


From the SSR Files

by Sholio



Category: Agent Carter (TV)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Multi, Snippets
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-01-17
Updated: 2018-01-01
Packaged: 2018-05-14 11:34:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 68
Words: 48,440
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5742253
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Formerly called "Agent Carter Scraps". A place to put vignettes that are too short or not finished enough to be uploaded as stories in their own right. </p><p>Updated Dec. 31, 2018 with chapters 62-68.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Jarvis patching up Peggy

**Author's Note:**

> I decided it was time to do some little collections for the random stuff, so it's all together in an easily accessible location.
> 
> The first ficlet in this collection was written for Fandom Stocking 2015 and [originally posted here](http://fandom-stocking.dreamwidth.org/604697.html?view=11870745#cmt11870745).

"Miss Carter, I had hoped we wouldn't make a habit of this."

Really, she hadn't _meant_ to stagger to Jarvis's doorstep and collapse. It had been a complete accident. She blamed the head injury.

However, if she'd known it would involve being lectured during the entire time he was stitching up the gash on her scalp ...

Also, did he really have to be _quite_ so free with the iodine? "Ow," she protested, trying to pull away, and then remembered why moving her head quickly was a bad idea, when the room swam around her.

Jarvis's hand firmly moved her head back into position. "Unless you'd rather have it done in hospital, which I would recommend --"

"No," she said firmly. "It's not that bad, and if I do, then I'll most likely have to explain why I was pursuing suspects after hours without calling for backup. My colleagues may have accepted me doing fieldwork now, but perhaps it's too much to hope that they might realize I actually _can_ take care of myself."

Jarvis said nothing, but his silence carried the strong implication that a sardonic comment was being ruthlessly suppressed.

"This," Peggy said with all the dignity she could muster while liberally splattered with her own blood and wearing a towel around her shoulders while having her head stitched up, "does not constitute a failure to take care of myself. I escaped without difficulty." The silence developed an extra sarcastic tinge. "Oh, _fine,_ perhaps there were a few difficulties. Minor ones."

"Yes. Well." Jarvis sat back and inspected his handiwork. "It wouldn't win any awards at the Greater Richmond County Needlework Festival, but it will do."

"Thank you." She looked around for her handbag, then remembered it had been taken by her captors. Oh dear. It had been a good sturdy one too, with the straps securely sewn on, excellent for swinging at people's heads. "I apologize for disturbing you so late. If I may use your phone, I assume a cab can be had at this hour --"

"You may do nothing of the sort." Jarvis pushed her back onto the sofa. "I have no intention of letting you run off in your condition. We have a guest bedroom, and I see no reason why you can't borrow a nightdress of Ana's. She is a bit less ... er ... she is a bit more vertical in certain areas of her body, but the larger ones ought to fit."

"Oh, I'm so sorry. I completely forgot. Did I wake her?"

"No, fortunately she is visiting a friend who's just had a young baby, and will not be back until tomorrow. If she were here, I'm sure she would extend the same invitation to you. You are also welcome to use the bath, of course."

"I'm sure a few moments with a wet cloth will have me good as new," Peggy said.

She was not so sure of that a few minutes later, examining herself in the mirror over the Jarvises' sink. Her face was chalk-pale, her lips standing out as a bright red and slightly smeared slash across the middle of it, and she swayed as she stood. Her blouse was as much a loss as the handbag. Head wounds certainly did bleed as much as people said. She would have to make a note of it for future.

She pulled back her hair and examined Jarvis's stitching with vision that kept blurring. It still looked rather bad, clotted with blood. Well, if it left a scar, it would be hidden by her hair.

She let the hair fall back and stripped off her clothing one painful piece at a time. Ruefully she examined the bruises on her upper arm, wrists, and shoulder, then washed and toweled herself carefully so as not to get blood on Ana Jarvis's things, and changed into the sleepwear and robe that Jarvis had given her.

She came out a bit hesitantly, and found Jarvis turning down the sheets in the guest room. "There is a glass of water and aspirin on the bedside table, you'll find," he said over his shoulder. "Please ring if you need anything."

"I don't plan to wake you." Still, she swallowed the aspirin gratefully. "You've done too much already."

"The alternative was leaving you to bleed on my steps, and I'm sure the neighbors would complain." 

Peggy sat on the edge of the bed, sinking into its softness and already feeling exhaustion beginning to claim her. 

"Jarvis," she said, drawing his attention as he finished fussing with the exact placement of items on the guest bureau. "Do you actually enter needlework competitions?"

"Oh yes, Miss Carter," he said, and turned to go. "I am a man of many talents, after all."


	2. Peggy's Christmas with Angie

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another Fandom Stocking 2015 fic, [originally posted here](http://fandom-stocking.dreamwidth.org/573613.html?view=11844013#cmt11844013).

Last Christmas, Peggy's roommate Pauline had gone out of town to see her parents in New Jersey. Peggy had celebrated the holiday (and the unique pleasure of having the room to herself for a day) by treating herself to a bottle of gin, a novel, and a full hour in the shared bath on her floor -- with no one else knocking on the door, as the place was half empty for the holiday. A small box from her grandmother had arrived a month late at the end of January, delayed by the inevitable vagaries of the post, containing a nice pair of new gloves that probably looked quite modern and fashionable to a lady approaching seventy-eight, who had not got the memo that a well-dressed young lady in the 1940s no longer wore gloves on most occasions. It was the only gift she had received, except for a couple of boxes of chocolates and flowers from various of her unwed co-workers who were hoping to make her acquaintance.

That had been Christmas 1945. Not much of a holiday, but when one is grown, Peggy thought, one no longer can expect to enjoy the holidays as a child would. And at least this year there wasn't a war on.

Christmas 1946 began with Midnight Mass with Angie's enormous and boisterous family. Peggy, not really a churchgoing person herself, hadn't been to a candlelight church service since her childhood, and had tried to reject the invitation, but "no" wasn't really an option when Angie had her mind set on something. And she found herself having a great deal of fun, not just meeting Angie's family (who were all as friendly and cheerful as Angie herself) but also the pleasant nostalgia of the candles and service and songs. She then had to extricate herself from several polite offers of drinks from Angie's various single cousins, and failed to extricate herself from an invitation to Christmas dinner with the entire Martinelli clan.

"What're you gonna do, rattle around in that big mansion all by yourself?" Angie asked.

"I was planning to sleep in, have a nice bath ..."

Angie threw an arm around her as they walked out into the midnight darkness, glittering with Christmas lights all up and down the street. "You'll have more fun with us, English. Tell me you won't."

And Peggy couldn't help smiling. "Yes. I think I will."


	3. Peggy dancing with Jarvis

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This ficlet was [posted here](http://such-heights.dreamwidth.org/459287.html?thread=8357399#cmt8357399) at such_heights' Kissing Fest back in May, for the prompt "Peggy/Jarvis, integrity". (It is, however, gen.)

"Mr. Jar -- _Roger Dearest_ ," Peggy said between her teeth, in a quiet yet piercing whisper aimed at his ears alone. "It is not an insult to Anna if you must kiss me to keep our cover. Sometimes we all must make sacrifices for undercover work."

"Miss Carter," he returned at the same low pitch, "I am not any sort of spy or government agent. I have been entirely faithful to my wife since the day I met her. I do not intend that to change now or in the future, regardless of mitigating factors."

Peggy had her arms looped around his neck. Jarvis was holding her gingerly around the waist, more like a man transporting a live grenade than one dancing with his (alleged) mistress. At least no one was staring at them. 

Yet.

"And besides, no properly brought-up gentleman would molest his ... paramour on a public dance floor."

"We are in America now," Peggy said in the flat American accent she was affecting for the role. She kicked him lightly in the shins, forcing him to sweep her in another turn with the rest of the dancing couples. "They are very forward people, Americans. When in Rome, and all of that."

Jarvis finally nerved himself to give her a chaste, very hasty peck on the cheek.

"I knew I should have asked Howard to escort me," Peggy sighed.


	4. Daniel almost drowning

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This was for such_heights' Kissing Fest in May 2015, for the prompt "Peggy/Jack/Daniel, drowning". [Originally posted here](http://such-heights.dreamwidth.org/459287.html?thread=8339735#cmt8339735).

Peggy is not quite certain, afterwards, how a fairly routine search for smuggled items on the docks turned into a free-for-all with a handful of burly smugglers. Fortunately both she and Daniel have the element of surprise on their side -- their opponents seem quite taken aback when Peggy kicks one of them in the groin while Daniel clotheslines another with his crutch. And Jack's adeptness at punching people is, for a change, proving useful.

She is beating a second burly gentleman into submission with a length of knotted rope when she sees, out of the corner of her eye, one of them swinging a wicked-looking iron rod with a hook at the end, straight at Daniel's head. Neither she nor Jack are close enough to do anything, and have their own problems besides. Still, she manages to shout his name, and he starts to turn, to dodge. Daniel has always been much faster than he looks.

But not fast enough. He manages to avoid being thoroughly brained as his opponent intended, but the length of iron glances off his head with a solid crack she can hear even from the other side of the dock.

"Daniel!" she screams again, as he goes suddenly, horribly limp, and slithers over the edge into the water.

Jack, whatever his other faults, is at least quick on the uptake. He delivers a solid uppercut to his opponent's jaw and then goes over the side after Daniel.

Unfortunately, so does the thug who'd managed to hit Daniel, and he's still got that bar of iron in his meaty fist.

Peggy finally manages to lay hers out with a good crack to the back of the skull. She scans quickly around to make sure no one looks like they'll be getting up anytime soon. Not a problem, she's fairly sure. Then she runs to the edge.

There's no sign of any of them. Just roiling dark water, glistening with the dock lights.

Her first urge is to jump in after them, followed by her calmer, more sensible self telling her that it would be more useful to have someone on the dock who can, say, throw in a rope or something.

But they are not ...

... not coming up.

Not both of them, she thinks. Not at once, not like this.

She can't simply stand here --

But even as she kicks off her shoes (because diving in without shoes is foolish and she needs every advantage she can have), a sleek water-dark head surfaces, and she throws herself full-length on the dock. She reaches down and Jack hands Daniel's limp body up to her. Jack is gasping and coughing himself, but she hasn't the hands to help, not until she's hauled Daniel up to the dock and then she can reach down and grip Jack's hand firmly, pulling him up after.

Jack half-sprawls on the wet dock planks, coughing. But Daniel -- Daniel is limp, unresponsive to her attempts to smack his face, to rearrange his limbs, to make him _react._

Jack struggles to his knees, wheezing and leaning heavily on his left hand, the right arm dangling limp. He shoulders Peggy out of the way. She slides back, because it seems like he knows what he is doing, and she does not know what to do.

Daniel's head lolls limply on the dock, his face slack. His hair drips water onto the dock planks when Jack repositions it with firm, efficient motions.

"What are you doing?" Peggy wants to know.

"Kiss of life," he tells her, hoarsely.

He was in the Navy. He knows how to deal with drowned men. He closes his lips over Daniel's slack ones, breathes for him. Again. Again. 

Peggy can't _not_ help, can't stand by and do nothing. One of her hands curls around Daniel's slack one; the other presses against Jack's wet back. She can feel the rise and fall of his ribs as he forces air into Daniel's lungs.

Daniel's hand, under hers, spasms suddenly. "Jack," she gasps, and she's not sure when _she_ stopped breathing, but surely her lungs are as empty of air as either of theirs.

Daniel's spine arches. Jack rolls him onto his side and he coughs helplessly. Jack's head hangs; he's gasping for air himself, and she can feel the rise and fall of his ribcage under her palm.

"Jack," she says. He turns to look at her, dazed. She lunges forward and kisses him, aiming for his cheek but missing to hit just beneath his eye instead. "Jack," she says again, and presses her face against his, because Daniel's breathing is slow and steady now, his side pressed against her, and Jack raises a shaking arm to wrap around her -- and she can stay here forever, in the adrenaline crash, with both of them close and safe and _hers._


	5. Drugged Peggy + Jack

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For such_heights' Kissing Fest in May 2015, for the prompt "Peggy/Jack, reversal". [Originally posted here](http://such-heights.dreamwidth.org/459287.html?thread=8357655#cmt8357655).

"No," Peggy managed to say, "no, do not, _Jack_ \--" But he'd already picked her up. The world spun.

"You can yell at me once you're out of here," he informed her. "Punch me too, possibly. Seems like something you'd do."

It was terribly frustrating. She couldn't get a grip on reality. She actually did try punching him, but missed.

"So, this is kind of a turnaround," he remarked. "Me saving you, for a change."

"I think that I have been ..." she tried. "Poisoned."

"Yes," Jack said. "Yes, you have. Not badly, I hope."

He set her down on something relatively soft, which she realized after a moment was his coat. It seemed to be gently swaying. She told herself sternly it was not actually doing that, but closing her eyes only made it worse.

Jack crouched down next to her. She squinted up at him. Focusing on his face was impossible, but she still got the impression of a strange mix of contradictory emotions.

"So, we're getting a doc down here to try to figure out what they gave you," he said. "Think you can manage to avoid fainting or dying until then?"

"I do not faint," she said through lips that were increasingly stiff with the effort to avoid being ill. Closing her eyes seemed the better part of discretion, to help block out the confused, swirling world.

"Hey," Jack said, patting her cheek. "Carter."

"Unless you wish to be vomited upon," she murmured faintly, "kindly do not bother me."

"All right." His hand closed on her upper arm. It was strangely comforting.

The last thing she felt was the light brush of his lips across her forehead.


	6. Team SSR as old folks reacting to the Ultron fight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This was posted [on tumblr](http://sholiofic.tumblr.com/post/114725402548/yavanna195-the-avengers-age-of-ultron-end) in response to a post about Peggy, Jack, and Daniel, as old people, watching the Ultron fight on TV and arguing about it. Vaguely implied Peggy/Daniel/Jack, but it could also be read as gen.

The entire population of Shady Acres Rest Home -- at least the mobile ones -- had crowded into the lounge, as close to the big-screen TV as they could get. Most of the residents were hushed with shock, watching the blurry onscreen footage of small, bright-colored figures zigging and zagging as they fought an army of robots. 

The worried hush meant that the voices from the back of the room carried over the top of everything else even more loudly than they normally would have, since all the participants were half deaf.

"Give them what-for, Natasha! Oh yes. That's my girl."

"I thought you'd be cheering for Steve."

"Steve doesn't need my accolades," Peggy said. It was one of her good days -- she was both lucid and alert, propped up on pillows in a chair. "He never has. Besides, I feel for the poor girl. One young lady on a team otherwise composed entirely of men? I know what _that's_ like."

"She's insulting you, Jack," Sousa said, prodding him with his cane. The cane was fundamentally unnecessary; Sousa hadn't been able to handle crutches for several years now, and had been getting around in a wheelchair. However, he was used to carrying something that could be used as a weapon in a pinch, and the cane a) was useful for speeding up the wheelchair, and b) had a sword in it.

Thompson woke with a start. "What?"

"Peggy's insulting you."

"I am _not._ Specifically. You are a man too, Daniel, last I checked." Then she rewound the last sentence in her head, and blushed.

"He was last I checked, too," Thompson said, and tipped his hat over his eyes. "Wake me up when they win."


	7. Rose on a field case

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This was from a prompt for Rose working a field case, [originally posted on Tumblr](http://sholiofic.tumblr.com/post/141291991948/prompt-rose-has-been-promoted-following-all-the).

Rose had been working the front desk at the SSR for much too long not to be well aware that the life of the average field agent was, in general, neither exciting nor glamorous. The fact that she'd gotten to beat up mob muscle and help steal nuclear warheads on her very first outing was, she knew, an anomaly.

But still, she'd hoped for something a trifle more exciting and glamorous than, well.

This.

"Come here, you little darling ..."

All right, it was definitely exciting. The glamorous part, however, was distinctly lacking.

On the other hand, even Agent Carter herself probably wouldn't have anticipated a disgruntled out-of-work actor with a mechanical engineering degree and a grudge against the entire Hollywood establishment, trying to blow up key studios using specially trained, explosives-laden jackrabbits.

"Get over here, you -- oh, fu -- fudgecakes!"

Finally, utilizing a dive that she'd learned in her surfing classes (though, as her elbows and knees informed her, it wasn't meant to be performed on rock-strewn sand), she managed to nail the little beast. Carefully she straightened up, holding the net and its struggling, explosive contents at arm's length, and marched it across the Stark Industries studio lot to the trailer at the far edge.

"Another one for you, Doctor!"

"Oh good," Wilkes sighed, straightening up from the anesthetized specimen on the table in front of him, from which he was slowly and painstakingly untangling bomb components. "Put it in the cage on the end there."

Rose opened the cage door, and reached one heavily gloved hand into the net. After some missed attempts, she managed to grab the rabbit by its scruff, just above its jury-rigged explosive backpack, and deposited it swiftly into the cage, then slammed the door in a well-practiced maneuver.

"I have a PhD," Wilkes remarked, as he went back to his work. "And I'm disarming jackrabbits."

Rose slung the net over her shoulder. Designed by Wilkes, with some modifications from Rose herself, it resembled a butterfly net in general style, but was a great deal more heavy-duty. "Look on the bright side, Doctor," she said, wiping a hand across her sweaty, sandy forehead. "You could be out there catching them."


	8. Winter Soldier Jack

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A Tumblr prompter suggested: _Peggy/Daniel/Jack - post s2 finale - shooter takes Jack after shooting him, winter soldier-ish brainwashing, Peggy and Daniel to the rescue?_ This is AWFUL and now I want to write 100K of it. But a short ficlet will have to do for now. [Originally posted on Tumblr.](http://sholiofic.tumblr.com/post/141294955318/peggydanieljack-post-s2-finale-shooter-takes)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Krav Maga video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmQk3DnTcSs) of handgun disarming techniques, one of which Peggy uses in this fic (and I think she uses another technique from this video, or something similar to it, in 1x06). Krav Maga was developed by and for the Israeli special forces towards the end of WWII and afterwards, but I think it's completely reasonable that Peggy could have been exposed to some of the same techniques through the SOE and people she met in various resistance groups.

It was important, Peggy thought, that Jack had, thus far, attacked them from a distance – never up close. Sniper rifles and explosives, not garroting wires, not handguns. The techniques they used on him must be derived from Fennhoff's, and those methods had been limited. Fennhoff hadn't been able to make Dooley kill her and Jarvis, or she suspected he would have. And he had only been able to coerce Howard into mass murder by spinning an elaborate scenario to convince Howard that he was doing good in the world. A person could not be compelled to go directly against their basic nature.

Or so she hoped, as she stood looking down the barrel of a pistol with Jack on the other end.

She did not bother to reach for her own. She wouldn't shoot him, not for this -- not even to save her own life. 

"Jack," she said. "You aren't going to do this. It isn't you."

Something flickered in his eyes. Recognition? He hadn't pulled the trigger yet. That was something.

"We're always pointing guns at each other, aren't we?" 

She took a cautious step forward. He was nearly in reach. Of course, at this range, she couldn't survive if he did pull the trigger. But ... Daniel's voice ran through her head suddenly. _That's why they call it gambling._

"Do you remember the first time you pointed a gun at me, Jack?"

Another step. He hadn't pulled back.

She was willing to gamble, but only so far. She snapped into motion without giving him a chance to react, bringing up her hands in a disarming move that one of her old S.O.E. instructors had taught her. She struck his wrist with the flat of her hand and, at the same time, slapped the gun out of his hand in the opposite direction.

The gun went clattering to the floor, but her sudden move seemed to snap Jack out of his paralysis and send her straight to the "threat" category.

The only other time she'd fought Jack hand to hand, she'd taken him out easily. But he hadn't taken her seriously as a threat, and he hadn't been genuinely trying to hurt her.

This time, neither of those were true. And whatever they'd done to him in the months that she and Daniel had been searching ... he was a _lot_ better at fighting now.

She evaded his first strike and blocked another on her forearms, a brutally hard blow that numbed her arms to the wrist and was going to bruise. Then he swept her feet out from under her and she went down hard. She rolled aside and dodged a driving blow to her throat that would have crushed her larynx.

She knew what her old instructors, the ones who'd taught her to fight for her life as a spy in wartime Europe, would say if they could see her now. They would tell her she wasn't fighting seriously. She was fighting to disarm, not to hurt or disable. But she was up against an opponent who wasn't pulling his punches.

She had to start fighting seriously, or she was going to lose. And if she lost, she was probably going to die.


	9. Daniel has a mechanical breakdown

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For the prompt: _Daniel has a mechanical breakdown._ [Originally posted on Tumblr.](http://sholiofic.tumblr.com/post/141297485758/prompt-fic-daniel-has-a-mechanical-breakdown)

Peggy was engaged in her own fight, with Daniel fighting at her back, when a loud crack echoed across the parking lot. In the middle of walloping a goon with a section of pipe, she couldn't spare a moment to look around and see what had happened. It wasn't until she'd laid out the last of them with a haymaker punch that she turned to find Daniel sitting on the gravel, surrounded by several unconscious goons of his own, with his crutch out of his reach.

"Daniel, please tell me that dreadful noise was not some part of you."

"Yeah, so ..." Daniel's expression was sheepish. "I broke my leg."

"Daniel!" she said in horror, and then she caught sight of his shoe ... with the foot still in it ... several feet from the rest of him. "Oh."

"Yeah."

"Were you by chance hitting someone with it?"

"Hey, someone was hogging the lead pipe."

Peggy extended a hand to help him, wobbling, to his feet ... or, rather, foot. "This promises to be awkward to explain."

"Stark keeps saying he wants to build me a better leg." He took the crutch she handed him, and got his balance, one-legged. "Think he'd put some weapons in it, if I asked him?"

Peggy picked up the shoe with its broken foot segment, and set a slow pace back to their car. "I expect the difficult part would be stopping him."


	10. Peggy Jack bodyswap

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For the Tumblr prompt: _Peggy, Jack, bodyswap._ [Originally posted on Tumblr.](http://sholiofic.tumblr.com/post/141298953653/prompt-peggy-jack-bodyswap)

The thing that surprised Daniel was how little difference it actually made.

If you actually _knew,_ the differences were obvious. At least, it was obvious to Daniel. They stood differently, moved differently, and of course they were both desperately struggling to fake an accent that didn't come naturally to them. (Peggy's American accent was a lot better than Jack's attempt to sound British. Daniel took to saying "Bloody Hell!" in Jack's dreadful accent every time he had the opportunity, just for the glares.)

So it amazed him that for three days, no one in the office picked up on it. He knew, and Rose knew, and the handful of scientists who were working around the clock (under threat of bodily injury from Peggy) to get them back to normal knew. Also, anyone who happened to hear the fierce, whispered arguments in the hallway outside the restrooms about bathroom etiquette when in the custody of someone else's body _would_ have known if they'd been paying attention.

But in general, the weird thing was that neither of them was really, fundamentally _that_ different to work with. They both were skilled fighters and good with a gun; they both had an alarmingly awful sense of humor (Daniel never realized just how bad some of Peggy's jokes were, until hearing her jokes coming out of Jack's mouth); they both were good spies with a fairly broad knowledge base, even if it was in generally different areas -- but, after working together as long as they had, they'd gotten in the habit of filling in for the other's knowledge gaps, to the point where it was almost effortlessly seamless.

Daniel himself started forgetting occasionally, towards the end, which of them he was actually talking to.

He was relieved beyond measure, of course, when they got back to normal -- not the least reason being that it had been unspeakably awkward pretending to date Jack Thompson (in Peggy's body) while actually dating the person occupying Jack Thompson's body. (Also, both of them had refused to kiss him -- Peggy on the grounds that it wasn't fair to Jack, and Jack on the same grounds except expressed more vehemently, through Peggy's mouth.)

But he thought that they really couldn't have asked for a better demonstration of the point Peggy herself had spent the last two years trying to drive home to her male co-workers: that the difference between herself and the male agents around her was only skin deep.

Or possibly it was just that Jack and Peggy were more alike than he'd ever realized, and _that_ was an epiphany that he was going to take awhile to work through.


	11. Peggy & Daniel sparring

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For the Tumblr prompt: _Peggy and Daniel sparring because they both need practice and it gets out of hand?_ [Originally posted on Tumblr.](http://sholiofic.tumblr.com/post/141299868453/prompt-fic-peggy-and-daniel-sparring-because-they)

"I don't know how I feel about this," Daniel said, standing awkwardly on the far edge of the tumbling mat in the SSR gym.

"I can clearly see how you feel about it, Daniel." Peggy bounced on her toes. Her hands were wrapped and she'd taken off her shoes, leaving her in stockings, but otherwise she was dressed as normal, in a crisply ironed pantsuit. "I promise not to hurt you ... too badly."

"That's not ..." Daniel paused and took a breath. "Look, I know you can probably whip my butt in a fight. That doesn't actually bother me. But the idea of fighting you --"

"I know. That's what needs to change." She approached, inside his reach. "And you sell yourself short. I think you can probably show me some tricks. And I can show you a few, as well." She clasped his hand. "We're a team, aren't we?"

"You know we are."

Peggy gave his hand a tremendous yank, and Daniel, startled, was slammed into his back on the mat. Peggy planted a stocking foot in his chest and smiled down at him. 

"We are a team that fights together. And both of us need practice at it." She extended a hand down to help him up. 

Daniel took it -- and yanked. She was expecting it and shifted her weight to avoid being thrown, but still ended up going down, catching herself on one hand on the mat next to him.

"That's the spirit," she said, grinning at him.


	12. New York SSR after Jack's shooting

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For the Tumblr prompt: _What happens in the New York SSR after Jack gets shot?_ [Originally posted on Tumblr.](http://sholiofic.tumblr.com/post/141301624643/what-happens-in-the-new-york-ssr-after-jack-gets)

In the wake of Jack's shooting, Daniel ended up as the acting Chief of the New York bureau as well as the West Coast division. It wasn't something he meant to happen, or anything he made official. Hell, if anyone was going to get the job officially, it should really be Peggy. But Peggy was out running down leads, and _someone_ had to keep things from spinning off their wheels over there, even if he was also trying to run his own division and coordinate the ever-expanding investigation into SSR corruption.

Running the New York office, even if he was doing it long-distance, turned out to be strange in a way that being the head of his own office never had been. He'd hired most of the people in the L.A. branch, aside from a handful like Rose who transferred over. In New York, though ... he knew most of those people. And most of them had known him when he was the low guy in the office hierarchy. Now he was giving them orders, and he wasn't sure who was more surprised, them or him, that they actually _took_ those orders. Listened to him. Respected him.

There were times when he just had to stop and shake his head at the fact that, in one short year, he'd gone from being the file monkey and the butt of most of the office jokes, to running the entire SSR.

And the crazy thing was, he'd give it up in a heartbeat if that obnoxious, arrogant asshole Thompson would just _wake up_ and take his damned job back.


	13. Jack figuring out about Peggysous

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Catching up on old prompts from March; this one was: _Peggy/Daniel. Jack watching and realizing that they are now a thing after he begins his road to recovery._ [Originally posted here.](http://sholiofic.tumblr.com/post/143308818093/peggydaniel-jack-watching-and-realizing-that)

Jack kicks himself later for not figuring it out sooner than he does. In his defense, he's busy with things like, oh, _breathing,_ and sitting up, and all those little details of life that he took for granted before his entire slate of secrets and lies was nearly wiped clean by an assassin's bullet. 

So life is pretty miserable and he's drugged to the gills half the time. Still, he sees quite a lot of both of them -- more than he would have expected, if he's going to be perfectly honest with himself. Waking up to find Carter curled up, asleep, on the chair by his bedside, did a real number on some part of him that still hasn't quite recovered. He will never, ever, even _hint_ at this to Peggy, but sometimes when he's trying to fight his way through a particularly unpleasant piece of his recovery, he'll think back to his first sight of her -- cheap hospital blanket tucked over her, feet curled up under her, head tipped against the back of the chair, snoring in a completely unladylike fashion, with a gun in her lap in case the unknown assassin comes back to finish the job. It's such a very _Peggy_ picture, but he also can't quite deal with the fact that she was there, she'd stayed; and he later finds out that she and Daniel had been taking turns.

And they keep coming back, coming to see him, bringing food from outside the hospital, bringing books or decks of cards, and always-welcome news from beyond the four walls that are the current boundaries of his world. With Peggy, it's friendship, something he still can't quite believe she's freely offering him; with Daniel, it's ... he doesn't even know, a sort of camaraderie under fire, maybe. Daniel's been where he is. And probably because of that, he doesn't really get a feeling of pity off Daniel, not even on the level of Carter's warm sympathy (which he can't take at all, on his worst days), but instead a casual "been there, done that" understanding that's precious beyond diamonds.

(Another thing he's never, ever letting them find out.)

But the point is, he doesn't actually see them together much at all. Passing in the doorway, sometimes talking in the hall. And there are little things, casual brushes as they pass each other ... a new warmth in the way they look at each other, maybe ...

And finally, while he and Daniel are playing cards (lackadaisically and often interrupted, due to Jack's continued tendency to fall asleep at random times), he puts a voice to the slowly growing suspicion that he's been turning over and over in his brain during long, drugged, half-awake nights. "So, you and Carter an item now, or what?"

Daniel gives him one of those quick little smiles, half sarcastic and half something else. "Took you long enough. Some secret agent, huh?"

"I'm _injured,"_ Jack shoots back, annoyed ... and, if he's going to admit it, maybe a little hurt they didn't say anything. Not that they owed him that, or anything else. But still. "When's the wedding?"

Sousa turns pink. "No wedding. Not yet. This is new. Brand new."

"Not making an honest woman of her? Sousa. You dog."

Pinker now. "Christ, Jack." He tosses down another round of cards with a little more force than necessary -- they're playing stud poker, badly.

Jack can't tell if it's genuine irritation, but ... that's really not where he wanted to go with this. "You and Carter. I'm glad," he says, and means it. Morphine has a really annoying way of dragging sincerity out of him. "Seriously. Congratulations. Nice to see my two favorite SSR agents getting along." Nice to see them happy, he means -- because they _are,_ and he'd never quite realized it, but now he can see: that's why there's a new light in Peggy's eyes, that's why Sousa's more relaxed than Jack's ever seen him. And he wants them to be happy. Can't quite say it, though.

"Your favorites? I'm flattered."

God damn morphine. He rallies enough to beat Sousa at the next two hands, just on general principles.


	14. Peggy with young Tony

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For the prompt _Peggy with young Tony (maybe including a Jarvis or two)_ and [posted here on Tumblr](http://sholiofic.tumblr.com/post/144378379383/peggy-with-young-tony-maybe-including-a-jarvis-or).

Peggy knew, of course, that Howard had a son. She'd attended the wedding (at which Howard got completely smashed) and she'd sent baby gifts, as well as stopping in afterwards to smile at a tired but cheerful Maria Stark and hold the baby while Howard insisted proudly that his two-week-old son had his eyes, his nose, his chin, and a great many other features that looked, to Peggy, indistinguishable from those of any other baby.

Peggy loved her own children dearly, and having two of her own had at least given her an ability to deal capably with them when they were small, but she had never understood the appeal of young babies that were not one's own. She knew why their parents would be proud of them, naturally, and she was happy on their behalf. But the desire to coo over other people's babies was not a trait she possessed.

Still, she was very happy for him, and privately hoped that, if nothing else, Maria and the baby would make Howard happier. The cheerful, irrepressible inventor she'd known in the war years had been worn down by the passing years and an ever-growing history of failures both professional and personal. His idealism was now as threadbare as an old carpet; his always-heavy drinking had started to worry her, and his womanizing -- annoying in his younger years, but at least joyous -- had, like the drinking, become less a source of pleasure for him and more of an escape. She and Howard had fought bitterly over some of his War Department contracts ("Do the words 'poison gas' mean anything to you, Howard?") and their once-deep friendship had grown strained.

But also, she was busy with SHIELD, and Howard had moved on to focus full-time on Stark Industries. Sometimes it seemed that time passed in the blink of an eye, and Peggy didn't even realize it had been five years since she'd held that seven-pound, slightly blobby-looking baby until the day that she came into her office and realized something was ... different.

She couldn't quite put her finger on what had alerted her, but she drew her sidearm. Best not to take chances. Carefully she looked around, trying to figure out what had drawn her attention --

Jarvis skidded into her office, looking panicked. Peggy spun around, started to raise her gun, and then lowered it. "Are you _trying_ to get shot?" she demanded. "Hello to you too, by the way. I didn't know Howard was in town." Even after all these years, where Howard went, so the Jarvises also went.

"He -- I -- appear to have lost something." Jarvis straightened his back and tried to look as if he had the situation well in hand. From the fact that he was flushed and sweating, his gray hair in disarray, she decided that he did not. "Have you seen anything, er -- out of the ordinary --?"

"In what way, specifically?" Peggy wanted to know. "Spit it out, man. What did you lose? One of Howard's inventions?" It had better not be another killer robot. They'd only just repaired the east wing of the facility since the last time.

"Not ... precisely ..."

There was a sudden clunk from under Peggy's desk.

Jarvis looked extremely guilty, but also relieved. Peggy gave him a long, accusing stare, and then marched over to her desk. She realized as she crossed the room what had made her think something was wrong: the state-of-the-art StarkTech miniature computer terminal on her desktop was missing. So was her phone. So, in fact, was her dot-matrix printer.

 _It IS some sort of robot,_ she thought grimly. _Possibly a self-assembling one. Howard, I am going to KILL --_

And then she looked under the desk and found a pair of large worried eyes staring back at her. it was not a killer robot, but a very small child surrounded by disassembled computer parts.

"Er ..." Peggy said, momentarily at a loss for words.

"Mr. Stark, you gave me the fright of my life," Jarvis said, kneeling down and reaching past her to pull the child out gently.

Peggy had an extremely bad instant -- _Dear Lord, Howard's gone and turned himself into a five-year-old_ \-- before she recovered her equilibrium, did a little mental math, and realized this must be the _young_ Mr. Stark.

"This is Miss Carter," Jarvis was saying, in a tone Peggy (being a mother) recognized very well; stern but not angry, reproving but gentle. "You should apologize for bothering her."

"But I wasn't bothering her," the child said.

The expression that crossed Jarvis's face was one that Peggy had seen directed at Howard any number of times: _This person will be the death of me._ Trying not to smile, she put her gun away under her jacket and knelt down to bring herself to the child's level. _Anthony,_ she recalled; _his name is Anthony._ "Hello, Anthony. I'm Peggy."

The child looked back at her with serious dark eyes and said, "I'm Tony. Anthony is what my mom calls me when she's mad."

"You took apart Miss Carter's computer without asking," Jarvis said.

"I'm making a death ray," Tony informed the adults. "Like Dad's."

Jarvis closed his eyes briefly. "Do you remember our talk about asking permission before touching other people's things? And also our multiple talks about building anything that may explode, speak, or eat the cat without speaking to an adult first?"

"No," Tony said, wide-eyed.

Jarvis looked like he wanted to beat his head against the wall. Still, Peggy couldn't help noticing that the boy was leaning against him, trusting and unconcerned despite his guardian's obvious and rising levels of frustration. She couldn't imagine Jarvis shouting at or hitting a child.

Even if he looked like he was at the end of his proverbial rope.

"Mr. Jarvis," she said, and held out a hand to Tony. "Why don't young Master Tony and I spend some time together this afternoon? You can spend some time with your wife, and he can show me how to put my computer back together."

"Death ray," Tony corrected her in his small voice. But he let her take his hand.


	15. Howard and Peggy awkwardness

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For the prompt _Peggy &Howard&Jarvis, "Someday we'll look back at this, laugh nervously, and change the subject."_ [Originally posted on Tumblr.](http://sholiofic.tumblr.com/post/144380665303/prompt-from-veledak-peggyhowardjarvis)

After some of the living situations she'd endured, Peggy felt it would be churlish to complain about living rent-free in a mansion ... even if it did come with certain drawbacks, such as a newly developed habit of getting dressed in the bathroom with the door closed to avoid having Howard's portrait leering at her throughout the process. Between Howard's habit of swimming nude, and Jarvis's exercise routine, she'd thought she was inured to the sights that might greet her beside the Stark pool.

She found out she'd been wrong when she wandered out to the patio one morning with her cup of tea in one hand and the morning newspaper in the other. It was a pleasant morning, cool and serene. She gazed upon the scene beside the pool for a moment or two before clearing her throat.

There was a hasty flurry of activity as Jarvis went into full retreat. Howard didn't move. "Morning, Peg!" he called cheerfully around his upraised and skyward-pointed leg, which was giving her a view of a good deal more of Howard than she wanted to see. "Come join us!"

"I'm quite fine over here, thank you. May I ask what you're doing?"

"Yoga! Eastern discipline. Good for the flexibility." 

"And is it ... _entirely_ necessary to perform it while naked?"

"Clothing interrupts the flow of chi." Howard switched to a new posture, spine arched and hands behind his head. "Jarvis, adjust my left leg, that's a good man -- Jarvis? Peg, did you steal my butler?"

"I believe he has decided to refresh your drink." At least, she'd last seen Jarvis heading into the house at a high rate of speed, holding a drinks tray -- though he'd been holding it somewhat lower and flatter than usual, owing to what he was trying to cover up. Unlike Howard, Jarvis hadn't been _entirely_ nude, but if she'd thought his workout gear left little to the imagination ...

"Shame. You should see him do the [firefly pose](http://www.yogajournal.com/pose/firefly-pose/). Actually, Peg, since you're there, could you come over here and give me a hand getting my legs closer together. I'm a little out of alignment here --" 

"I believe I will have my tea on the east lawn," Peggy declared, and took herself briskly inside. At least now she knew why Ana preferred to have her morning coffee on the balcony overlooking the pool on Tuesdays and Thursdays.


	16. Michael Carter is a werewolf

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For the hilariously brilliant prompt: _Michael Carter was actually turned into a werewolf!_ [Originally posted here.](http://sholiofic.tumblr.com/post/144382769653/prompt-from-muccamukk-michael-carter-was-actually)

"Thank you, Vernon," Peggy murmured, "for being a _paranoid_ would-be blackmailer ..."

She opened the copy of the M. Carter file that Jack had dug up among Vernon's private files. 

"It's not quite the same as the other one, though," Jack said, looking over her shoulder. "There's more information here. I don't think I was his only source of intel on you. Or ... on whatever happened in 1944, I mean."

"I can assure you I was nowhere near it. Did you read the other file?" Peggy turned pages. Words jumped out at her under the ultraviolet light in her hand: _torn apart ... entire village dead ... utter savagery ..._

"Some of it. Enough to know what I had. I only got so far into it before --" He stopped and shook his head, as if to clear something out of it.

"You didn't want to think I'd done it?" she couldn't help asking.

"Everyone's got skeletons," he said. "None of us got out of the war without 'em. But yeah, whatever your war stories are, thinking about _that_ turned around a lot of things I thought were true about you. Good to know it's not your style."

Peggy suppressed a smile. "Thank you, I think." 

After a hesitation, Jack said, "I really thought it was a smokescreen. The original file, I mean."

"It may have been," Peggy murmured, leafing through the pages. "But there was definitely something going on in 1944. Related to Howard's Midnight Oil experiments, perhaps. I'll talk to him about it." She frowned. "The word that keeps coming up is 'wolf'. Project Wolf. I don't remember hearing of any such thing when I was working with the SOE. Have you ever heard of it?"

"No." Jack leaned a hip against Daniel's desk. He still couldn't stand for long periods of time. "What I still don't understand, though ... if the file is legit, what's your name doin' on it?"

"Just because parts of it may be real doesn't mean it hasn't been doctored." She was not yet ready to voice a small but growing suspicion: _What if this file is not about me at all?_


	17. Peggy teaching Ana self-defense

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For the lovely prompt: _Ana Jarvis! More awesome things like the garter-holster! Awesomeness in general!_ [Originally posted here.](http://sholiofic.tumblr.com/post/144386161678/prompt-from-sapphire2309-ana-jarvis-more-awesome)

"Miss Carter, I would like to ask a favor of you."

Peggy looked up, startled; she'd been poring over SSR papers in the Stark living room (one of the living rooms, that is), while Howard's ever-present portrait presided over her. "Of course. Anything."

"This is not a simple thing." Ana sat down carefully across from her. She was getting around much better now, but still moved stiffly; as Peggy knew from personal experience, getting over abdominal wounds took time. Her own still pained her occasionally, something she had absolutely no intention of telling anyone, particularly Daniel.

"It doesn't matter if it's difficult. Please, anything you like." Even knowing that the Jarvises didn't blame her for Ana's shooting, Peggy still struggled with the feeling that she had a lot to make up for. She was the one who had brought danger into their world. It seemed unfair that Ana had been the one to suffer for it.

Ana folded her hands on the table. "I would like to learn to fight."

"Oh," Peggy said, startled.

"Don't look at me like that. Please. I know no one else I can ask. No one who would teach me seriously, no one who would not pat me on the head and send me off. Even Edwin does not understand. Please, Miss Carter." Her hands were knotted together now. 

"I can show you some things, but ... Ana, are you sure?"

"I am done running," Ana said. Her voice was calm, but her eyes were pleading. "Back in Budapest, I knew how to do nothing except hide and run. If only someone like you had been able to teach me then!"

"You couldn't have fought the Third Reich, Ana!"

"You did," Ana said simply.

And Peggy had to stop and think about that. She would have had no problem showing Rose a few moves, although Rose was fairly good already. And back in New York, she had taught Angie a few things to go with the dirty street-fighting moves that all the Martinellis picked up in grade school.

Why was Ana different? She wasn't, of course. The world was dangerous for civilian and combatant alike; violence came to the gentle and to the fierce. The war had proven that a million times over.

"Of course I'll teach you," she said, and Ana beamed.

 

***

 

To Peggy's discomfiture, Ana showed up to their first lesson wearing a veritable arsenal. Peggy recalled that Ana had been entertaining herself during her convalescence with sewing and crochet; what she had not noticed, and it seemed no one else had either, was that Ana had made herself a matching set of lace-edged undergarments that contained knives, brass knuckles, a small gun to match the one Ana had provided for Peggy's garter holster, and even a leg sheath, padded with a knitted sleeve in delicate blues and shell-pink, that contained a tire iron. ("But one can only wear it under a heavy skirt, and this weather is too hot for it, of course ...")

"Ana ..." Peggy gently relieved her of the tire iron. "I should start by mentioning that weapons are all well and good, quite useful really, but having a lot of weapons you don't know how to use will only slow you down and get you hurt. Cleverness and a willingness to deal harm to others will go a good deal farther than an arsenal."

"A willingness to deal harm to others," Ana repeated. She was intent, soaking it all up, practically quivering with interest.

"Yes ..." And Peggy was able to nail down, now, precisely why the idea of teaching Ana to fight bothered her in a way that it didn't with Rose or Angie. It wasn't that Ana was too delicate or that she deserved to be coddled in a way the others didn't. It was that Peggy wasn't sure if Ana _could_ get in touch with that part of herself that was willing to watch bruises bloom on someone else's skin, blood erupt from someone else's flesh, and still keep hurting them, until they stopped trying to hurt you. And if it wasn't something that came naturally, she wasn't sure if it was morally justifiable to teach Ana to reach for it until she could do it.

_Everyone has anger. Some of us eat it; some of us wear it on the surface ... but considering what she's been through, she must have more than most._

And she reminded herself that during the war, millions of boys had had no choice. Whether they were angry or not, whether they wanted to fight or not. But for an accident of her sex, Ana would have gone off to war, and it would not have mattered to anyone whether she was a gentle soul or not, whether she wanted to shoot someone or not. 

And of course, in the end, as the war had ground on in its vile tracks, it didn't matter whether she was a woman or not, a civilian or not. They would have shot her just the same. 

_Like Whitney did._

_Because of me._

"First," Peggy said, taking Ana's hand in hers and gently folding over her fingers, "I'll show you how to make a fist."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ... and basically this is about 5% of a fic I now need to write about Ana dealing with undiagnosed PTSD and Peggy dealing with her unacknowledged guilt and so forth.  >_>


	18. Daniel seeing Peggy get hurt

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For the prompt: _Daniel thinks after Roxxon, it'll get easier to see Peggy hurt. It doesn't._ [Originally posted here.](http://sholiofic.tumblr.com/post/144443251863/prompt-daniel-thinks-after-roxxon-itll-get)

He's heard the expression "to hurt for someone", but Daniel never realizes how literal it can be until helping free Peggy from the rebar in the Roxxon facility. Her small gasps of pain go through him like a knife, and when she struggles to breathe, it punches the air out of his lungs.

He thinks this must be something you can build up a tolerance for. He of all people should know how infuriating unwanted sympathy can be, the way it can suck the heart out of you. He loves her, admires her; he doesn't want to make her hide her light on his account. Peggy's life is dangerous and that's part of what Daniel admires and respects about her: not the danger, but her willingness to face it head-on.

Still, as he wraps a bandage around her sprained wrist, as he grimly dresses the bullet wound in her shoulder (now she'll have matching scars on each side, because Peggy likes matching accessories, he thinks with gallows humor), as he brings her a cup of tea to soothe a throat that's raw from smoke inhalation, he feels each wound as if it's his own. No, he can't build up a resistance to this. His heart can't develop calluses; it's never been able to. 

All he can do is support her and do his best to remember that, if he can't help bleeding _for_ her, the least he can do is try not to bleed _on_ her. Not about this.

(The thought doesn't occur to him until a long time later, as she's stitching up a knife gash on his arm with her lips compressed into a thin lipsticked line, that perhaps she feels the same for him.)


	19. Jack helping Peggy house-hunting

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For the delightful prompt: _Peggy & Daniel are house hunting sometime in the future, planning to live together or whatever, getting married. Daniel is too busy with bureaucracy stuff, Peggy is too busy not letting LA get destroyed and stuff. Somehow Jack ends up helping them house-hunt because otherwise he will never get them to shut up about it._ [Posted on tumblr here.](http://sholiofic.tumblr.com/post/144694158378/peggy-daniel-are-house-hunting-sometime-in-the)

"We wouldn't be having to do this if Sousa hadn't carelessly let his house get blown up by that death ray." Six months ago. Really, Jack thought, was he the only person in this entire organization who was capable of advance planning?

" _We_ ," Peggy said grimly, "do not have to be doing this at all."

"Oh look, nice little bungalow, three bedrooms -- plenty of room for the little Carter-Sousas --"

"And look at all those cars. Someone has probably already purchased it." Peggy began to steer around the traffic jamming up the suburban street.

"That's what you said at the last three open houses. You're going to have to stop eventually."

It was exasperation, mostly, that had him dragging Peggy around to real estate open houses on a Sunday afternoon, or possibly being dragged; it was hard to say. However, if someone didn't do something, it was going to be 1970 and the Carter-Sousas were going to have five children and they would all STILL be living in Howard Stark's spare bedroom. Not that there wasn't room for twelve or fifteen children in that house, and wasn't _that_ a terrifying thought. He tried to shake off the mental image of a swarm of dark-haired children, all of them rebellious, smart as whips, and possessing no sense of self-preservation whatsoever.

Peggy got out of the car and slammed the door, perhaps a trifle harder than necessary. "What is the point of any of this? I have more important things to do. Can't one pick out a house from a catalogue? They're all completely interchangable in this country anyway."

"It's like a car. You have to look at it before you buy it." Not that he had more than a vague idea of what house-buying entailed. He had no particular desire for home ownership himself, as long as he could rent a nice apartment where someone _else_ took care of the maintenance and made sure the lawn was mowed. Still, a married couple (or a soon-to-be-married couple) should have a house. And although he wasn't going to admit it, he thought Peggy and Sousa should have a nice house, if only because it would give them someplace to go in the evenings and they'd cause fewer headaches for him.

"Coming through, looking at the house," Peggy snapped, forging a path through clusters of housewives in bright frocks and curly hairdos, gathered to chat on the sidewalk. For most of the other people at the open house, it seemed to be an excuse to socialize and eat from the plates of little canapés provided by the listing agent. Peggy charged through them like a small annoyed British bulldozer, forcing them to jump out of her way or get run over. Jack followed more sedately, taking the time to smile at a few ladies who didn't seem to have husbands nearby.

He did have to admit that Peggy had a point about the house. Like most of the subdivisions they'd driven through, the entire street was lined with identical beige-colored houses, all of them freshly built after the war, with freshly seeded lawns feebly attempting to grow, and scrawny shrub-sized trees in the yard wrapped in sacking. It looked like a boring place to live. But that was sort of the point, wasn't it?

"It is indeed a house," Peggy declared after a few cursory peeks into corners and an uninterested glance around the kitchen.

"There's a basement," Jack reported, having picked up a copy of the mimeographed brochure prominently displayed on a table by the door.

"Why should I care whether there is a basement?"

"Well ... you could do -- basement things." Jack had grown up mainly in boarding schools. Basements were apparently a selling point or they wouldn't be on the brochure, though.

Peggy stepped back out in the glare of the California sunshine. "Fine, I suppose we'll buy it."

"It's the first house you've looked at," Jack said, somewhat taken aback. "And you haven't even talked to Sousa yet."

"Oh, there are rules about this sort of thing, are there?"

He was starting to see why Sousa had been dodging the house-hunting issue. Actually, he was starting to think he might have been cleverly manipulated into being Peggy's sounding board for this operation. "Well ..." he began, but was saved by a fireball blazing across the pale blue noonday sky. Too low and bright to be any sort of meteorite, it appeared to be headed for the open desert.

"That looks serious," Peggy said in delight, and while the crowd broke out into a babble of worried speculation on meteors and military planes, she sprinted for the car.

Jack followed, resigned. It seemed house-hunting would have to wait for another day.


	20. Howard loving Steve

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: _So one of the things I loved most in first season was Howard saying he loved Steve too--I'm super glad that slash fans had something, but for me, it was this explosion of feels because men today can never say things like that, that they love another man in friendship (except in the most dudebro way). So…not much in a way of prompt but something about Howard coming to terms with losing Steve, or on his journeys to find Steve, or something? With or without Peg's help._ [Originally posted here.](http://sholiofic.tumblr.com/post/144694777383/prompt-from-gwyn-so-one-of-the-things-i-loved)

If Howard were to try to sum up Steve in one sentence -- his relationship with Steve, why Steve mattered, why he missed him, all of it -- that sentence would be: _Steve was good._

And there were so many other things tangled up in that. _Steve was the one good thing I ever did, the proof that all of this wasn't a waste. Steve was a good person; Steve was good to know; Steve made ME want to be a better person._

_This awful, fucking, broken world needed Steve, because he was good._

All of that.

But he couldn't really say it; he had no one to say it to. Girlfriends, who knew Steve only as a pretty face on posters, who exclaimed over how he'd known _the_ Steve Rogers; Jarvis, who had never met Steve, who listened with a polite sympathetic face but didn't understand; even Peggy couldn't be a sounding board for Howard's thoughts on Steve, because she was _too_ close, and he hated to reopen those wounds again. Had, in his own way, tried to protect her from it.

Besides, even that, Howard's closest approach to sincerity on the topic of Steve Rogers, didn't quite hit the mark. What it all came down to anyway was: _I miss my friend._

It wasn't the paragon he missed, but the man. Because Steve Rogers was _good_ , and now he was dead, because Howard had fucked up.

And no technological marvel could ever make that right.


	21. Angie & Peggy girl's night

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: _Angie & Peggy - having a girl's night_. [Originally posted here.](http://sholiofic.tumblr.com/post/144696253118/prompt-from-tamsinwillougby-angie-peggie)

"Here," Angie announced, tossing a frock onto Peggy's bed. "You're gonna wear this. And you're gonna have fun tonight."

"Excuse me?" She'd just gotten in from an exhausting day at the SSR. Her feet hurt, her hair was wilted, and she couldn't figure out how Angie could still be this chipper after what had to have been an equally wearying day at the automat.

"Come on, English. No is not an option. We're going to dance, make eyes at the boys, and get them to buy all our drinks for us."

Peggy flopped onto the bed. It was all she felt like doing. "I ... I'm not good at dancing."

"You don't have to be good at it, especially after a few drinks. Nobody will care."

"But ... no ... Angie ..." She was being dragged off the bed, whether she wanted to go or not. Her sprained shoulder from hitting that man with a blackjack last week twinged.

And then she thought: bollocks, why not? True, she was tired; true, she had to be up in seven hours to get ready for work again.

But she wasn't even thirty yet, and she'd survived the war and a job that seemed hell-bent on killing her. Her best friend, having let go of her arm, was standing there in an alarmingly short dress with a swishy skirt, hands on hips and eyes bright, waiting for her.

And Peggy felt a renewed surge of energy. She had never lived that life, the lives of these young New York girls, who worked all day and danced all night. But in that instant, she could see how and why they did it. They were young, and alive, and maybe even after everything she done, she still had a few things to learn about living from women who had never crossed the ocean and shot men in war. 

"Give me five minutes to change and I'll be there," Peggy promised, seizing the frock. And Angie's face lit up with a smile as bright as sunshine.


	22. Michael meeting Jack again

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This one is a combination of multiple, similar prompts:
> 
>  
> 
> _Peggy discovering a not so dead Michael and a daily dose of angst mixed in with a cranky on the mend Thompson and a helpful supportive Sousa. And a very confused Jarvis._
> 
>  
> 
> And also:  
>  _Michael Carter and Jack Thompson meet (again?)_
> 
> and:  
>  _Peggy's fiance meets her brother. (Take whatever angle you want on whether Michael shot Thompson or not.)_
> 
>  
> 
> [Originally posted on Tumblr.](http://sholiofic.tumblr.com/post/144799636653/are-you-still-taking-prompts-peggy-discovering-a)

"Hell and damnation, Peg, the spy business must be working out for you," was Michael's remark when he saw Howard's house.

"It's not mine, you wanker. I'm staying with a friend."

"You know how to cultivate the right friends," Michael murmured.

She had to keep glancing at him, to reassure herself that he was really there. She was caught between wanting to yell at him forever and possibly hit him again (he still had a split lip and black eye from her fist's recent contact with his face), and an overwhelming urge to hug him and never let go.

It was disconcerting to see him with the tracks of years on his face. He would be in his early thirties now, but in her head he was frozen in time, an insect in amber caught on the last day she'd seen him. To her he was forever twenty-four, a handsome soldier in uniform. She had moved past him, as a younger sibling was never supposed to do to the older. He would never catch up.

... or so she'd thought, but here he was, older and wearier, with -- God! -- the first strands of gray in his brown hair.

And at the rate she was going, she'd stand here until she turned gray herself, woolgathering on the front porch. Peggy opened the door and ushered Michael into the house, drawing a steadying breath as she did so.

Why the nervousness, she wasn't sure. She'd explained the situation to Jarvis and Daniel over the phone -- or, well, parts of it -- so everyone in the house would know by now that Peggy's brother was with her. They didn't know the details (she planned to tell Daniel later, in private) but this was ridiculous, it was as if she was taking a ... a boyfriend home to meet her family --

_That's it exactly, it's the same feeling. It's like I'm taking Michael to meet my family and I want them to like him._

Which was silly, of course. Michael _was_ her family.

And yet, there was so much water under the bridge, so many changes since she'd mourned him only a few short years ago. She had adored Michael as a child; he had been her hero, her biggest supporter ... and the only person in her family she'd really got on with. Michael's death and her subsequent enlistment in the SOE had deepened and widened the gulf between Peggy and her family. Only now did she realize that she had gone to another shore and built something else here. The word "family" wasn't quite right (she _had_ a family; she didn't see the people here as a replacement for them, or quite the same thing at all) but it was ... meaningful, she thought. Yes. And it mattered to her, what Michael thought of them, and what they thought of him.

"Peggy!" Daniel was in the kitchen with Ana, and he lit up, as always, when he saw her. She wondered if the look on her face was in any way a mirror of his.

And he was already stepping forward, holding out a hand. "Michael? I'm Daniel Sousa. It's a pleasure."

Michael shook his hand. "I've heard a lot about you already." He winked at Peggy. "A definite improvement over Fred, I have to say."

"Fred?" Daniel said blankly.

"A part of my _past,"_ Peggy said firmly, attempting to step on Michael's foot, but he evaded her with the ease of practice. "Not at all applicable in the present day. He wasn't so bad as all that, Michael."

"Fred was a twat."

Ana giggled, covering her mouth.

"Oh, who's this?" Michael asked, taking her hand, and Peggy was startled all over again by that smooth charm. Of course, she had never really seen her brother with girls. He'd gone off to school, and then off to war, and she'd hardly ever seen him as an adult at all.

" _Mrs._ Ana Jarvis, and it is my very great pleasure." Ana beamed at him. "I did not know Peggy had a brother! You look very much like her."

"We look nothing at all alike," Peggy protested.

Michael laughed, still holding Ana's hand, and Peggy had to stifle a little clutch of delight that he was getting along with them. It really _was_ very much the same thing as Michael and Fred. She had so wanted them to get on with each other. And, oh, she might not be that girl anymore, but she wanted Michael to approve of Daniel, and to like her friends.

She had to admit, privately, that Michael perhaps had a point about Fred. 

But Michael did seem to like Daniel. At least he had been friendly. She slipped a hand into Daniel's, and he smiled at her.

"Seems nice," he murmured.

"I think he approves of you," she murmured back. "He hasn't said anything terrible yet."

"How terrible is he likely to get?"

"That depends on how drunk he gets."

Daniel's eyes danced, and Peggy thought _Oh bollocks_ even before he said, "So, he grew up with you, right? He knows all the dirt on you, doesn't he?"

"Daniel, don't even --"

"Say, Michael," Daniel said, swooping in with a quick mischievous look back over his shoulder at Peggy. "Care for a drink?"

"Daniel, need I remind you, I have a strong right hook ..."

She trailed them out onto the patio, where the rest of the household -- presently consisting of Jarvis, Jack, and Jason Wilkes -- were playing cribbage for spare change. More accurately, Jason was winning as usual, since he'd turned out to be a remarkably cut-throat cribbage player. Jarvis was playing intently and badly; Jack was slouched with half his attention on the game and a drink in his hand, not particularly seeming to care which way the points went but somehow coming close to winning half the time anyway.

The three of them looked up; Jason raised a hand in a small wave, Jarvis sprang to his feet to offer Ana a chair, and Jack --

Jack was scrambling to his feet and reaching for the gun that he'd kept under a chair cushion ever since he'd been shot.

And Michael had whipped instantly into a defensive stance, reaching under his jacket for the gun Peggy had seen earlier that he kept there.

She reached out by instinct, touching his arm, and Michael's hand froze on the weapon. Jack still had his gun out.

"Stop it, both of you," Peggy snapped. "What's going on?" Her words were addressed to both of them, but she'd turned to Michael, appealing to him.

Never taking his eyes off Jack, Michael said slowly, "So, Peggy, there's something rather awkward we need to talk about."


	23. Peggy & Daniel's kids at Halloween

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: _i'd like to see peggysous getting their kids ready for halloween. i imagine their kids would be best dressed with their parents undercover skills._ [Originally posted here.](http://sholiofic.tumblr.com/post/144800305708/idk-if-you-are-still-doing-prompts-but-id-like)

"All right, so we've found Susan and Jackie ..."

It was three in the morning on Halloween night, and Peggy and Daniel were engaged in the usual post-Halloween ritual of trying to figure out what the four children had done with themselves THIS time. Their children were spread out between the ages of fifteen and four, and all of them had some vague idea of what their parents did for a living (if not the specifics). A long time ago, the Carter-Sousas had badly underestimated how much children soaked up of their parents' spy trade, and they'd never quite found a way to stifle the annual "let's vanish and see if Daddy and Mum can find us" ritual.

"Last time," Peggy said thoughtfully, "Michael was pretending to be a bush in the Campbells' yard ..."

"I really think he's stopped taking his disguise cues from _Rocky & Bullwinkle,_ honey."

"Besides, he never does the same thing twice. It was Gloria we found two years in a row with a shrub on her head."

"Didn't she pretend to be the mailman last year?"

They looked at each other and chorused, "Mailbox."

"I'll check the mailbox, you look around the backyard and see if Michael's on the outbuilding roofs."

"Got it," Peggy sighed, and went off to try to find her youngest son before the sun came up.


	24. Peggy and avocados

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This one wasn't for a prompt; I just wanted to do something with Peggy and avocados. :D

"Mr. Jarvis, what on earth is that?"

"That, Miss Carter," Jarvis said without looking up from his neat slicing, "is an avocado. Ana is quite fond of them." His tone implied that even perfect people must have a _few_ flaws, and be forgiven for them.

"Oh." Peggy reached cautiously for a slice that had not yet been incorporated into the tidy array of food artistry taking shape on Ana's lunch plate. "Of course I've heard of them; I've simply never seen one before."

"How have you managed to remain in this city for months without doing so?"

"Oh, I don't know ... perhaps I was distracted by running for my life, investigating highly placed government conspiracies, sorting out difficulties in my romantic life, attempting to avoid being killed by a --"

"Point taken," Jarvis said hastily. He looked over at Peggy, who had bitten down on the green slice. "What are your thoughts?"

"I ... I have no idea." She stared at the remaining bite, pinched between two fingers. "It ... tastes very ... green."

"An accurate assessment." He lifted the plate with a flourish. "And now I must take my wife her lunch. There is still half an avocado on the sideboard if you would like it."

She could still taste the last bite. "I think I may save that pleasure for the future."

"I have heard they're very good for the complexion as well," Jarvis said, on his way out of the room.


	25. Peggy & Daniel date with dead body

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This one is the result of [a comment from Enver at a con](http://peg-carter.tumblr.com/post/145762126788/well-you-know-with-that-cliffhanger-its-a) that Peggy and Daniel's first date would just be the two of them standing over a dead body. [Originally posted on Tumblr.](http://sholiofic.tumblr.com/post/145804394458/based-on-this-post-and-primarily-this-it-was-a)

It was a nice restaurant, a distinct change from the diners and takeout places where SSR agents typically grabbed a bite on the run. Or at least it had been, until Carter and Sousa got done with it. 

Jack picked his way through broken glass, overturned tables, and shattered dinner plates. He ground the sole of his shoe on a candle guttering slowly where it lay on its side, putting it out before it could set fire to anything flammable. The drapes looked like they'd been on fire earlier, but someone had managed to extinguish them before the whole place went up.

He had to walk slowly. He was only a few days out of the hospital, prone to shortness of breath just crossing a room, and dizzy spells from climbing the flight of stairs into the West Coast SSR bureau. Which was in fact where he'd been, sitting in a corner of Daniel's office and sifting through Vernon's files in search of a clue to the person who'd nearly ended his life on the floor of an L.A. hotel room, when the call came in. He couldn't _not_ go.

The sound of sharp British tones drew him towards the kitchen, where he found Peggy haranguing an unlucky junior SSR agent. "Good Lord, man, it's only a dead body, surely you saw them during the war? I need to see the bullet wounds on the other side."

The green-looking SSR agent helped her turn the body over, while Jack folded his arms and lounged in the doorway. Peggy wore a peach-colored dress with bright red flowers, which conveniently helped hide the bloodstains now splattering the hem. It was a lot dressier than her usual styles ... in fact ...

"Peggy, were you on a date?"

She looked up at him. "What are you doing here? I thought you were off duty. And out of your jurisdiction."

"Aren't you technically on vacation?" he felt compelled to retort. "And where's --"

"Peggy, I got a lead on the other shooter in the alley; the busboy for the restaurant next door saw him go over a fence." Sousa came in, looking down at a notebook rather than where he was walking -- and yeah, he was dressed to the nines, too.

Amazing.

"Of course if you two go out for an evening, it's going to end in a bloodbath."

"For your information," Peggy retorted, "only two people are dead, and both are most likely Leviathan agents."

"Some people can manage to go on a date without _anyone_ getting shot."

"Some people can manage to catch a flight to New York without anyone getting shot, either," was Sousa's contribution, with a slight edge to it.

Honestly, it was like he didn't sign these people's paychecks. Okay, in Sousa's case, he hadn't for months. But still.

"I think it's only fair to alert the LAPD if you two are going on a date, so they can be prepared for mayhem in the vicinity."

Sousa's ears had turned pink. "Are you going to help, or stand there and heckle?"

"I dunno, looks like you two have got things well in hand." It wasn't a _major_ factor that the wall was doing a pretty good job of holding him up. Plus, they really did seem to have things under control. And neither of them had any new bullet holes, which was the main thing he'd needed to reassure himself about.

Okay, gawking at the property destruction was also a bonus.

Especially since it wasn't coming out of _his_ department's budget.

.... er. Depending on how Sousa decided to spin it. Considering that Peggy did still work for Jack, if you wanted to get technical about it, although they were deep in a web of technicalities now ... she'd never _really_ come off vacation ...

So either this was his problem or Sousa's, and working out the details was going to be a problem for the boys down in Accounting to figure out. Meanwhile, he leaned against the wall and watched Sousa kneel down by Peggy -- one knee on the floor, the other cocked up, with his crutch leaning against the counter. Their foreheads were almost brushing as they examined the bullet wounds on the corpse, Peggy measuring the angle with a spatula.

They really were made for each other, in a completely terrifying way that was likely to be a nonstop budget headache for the SSR from here on out.

Peggy looked up. "Jack, if you are going to stand there insufferably _smirking,_ make yourself useful and fetch the fingerprint kit from Daniel's car, would you?" 

There was a time and a place to point out that he didn't need to take orders from her, being in charge and all. But he'd learned to pick his battles, and so, with a final glance in their direction that was both amused and fond, he went off through the mayhem of the restaurant's main dining room to get it.


	26. Jarvis & Daniel h/c

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: _Jarvis and Sousa hurt and comfort fic_. [Originally posted here.](http://sholiofic.tumblr.com/post/146103746243/finally-getting-to-the-last-couple-of-prompts-from)

The thing that had come as a complete shock to Daniel was how well Jarvis actually handled himself in a firefight. It was easy to forget that the guy had been in the war like the rest of them. Jarvis hadn't actually shot anyone, but he'd kept a level head, handed loaded weapons and ammo to Daniel, and did a surprisingly good job of fending off two of their assailants with a crowbar.

Now they were barricaded in a storeroom, completely out of ammo, and Jarvis -- still completely calm despite all the blood -- was bandaging Daniel's arm using both of their ties and part of his own shirt.

"You're good at this," Daniel remarked, because he needed to talk -- he hadn't realized that keeping _himself_ calm was actually going to be the difficult part. At least it wasn't his right arm, but it was the left one, his crutch arm. He didn't have any more limbs to lose at this point, and every time he moved, pain ground down to his fingertips.

"Believe me, dealing with Mr. Stark, not to mention Miss Carter's exploits, leaves a person with a certain ability to roll with the punches, as it were." Jarvis snugged the tie tight around Daniel's forearm, and Daniel clenched his teeth on a rush of cold sweat and nausea. It wasn't entirely physical. He could deal with using the crutch with his right arm for a few days while the left one healed, but his brain kept giving him nightmarish images of his left arm truncated, ending in a hook.

_It's not going to turn out that way. Not this time._

Things were ominously quiet outside the door. "You think Peggy got our distress call?" Daniel asked, only realizing after the words were out of his mouth that he was supposed to be the one offering reassurances, not asking for them.

"I am quite sure she did."

Even as Jarvis said it, there was a muffled explosion, shuddering down through the entire facility.

"Yeah," Daniel said, and gritting his teeth, he pushed himself up from the pile of old sacks that had been serving as a makeshift bed. Jarvis offered a supportive hand, fingers stained with dried blood, but Daniel shook his head and gripped the crutch with his good right hand, trying to adjust to leaning his weight on the unaccustomed side.

"I assume that's Miss Carter," Jarvis said, as another explosion sent dust sifting down from the ceiling.

"I think it's safe to say that, yes." He only hoped there would be enough of their attackers alive to question once she found all the blood.

"Shall we go?" The words were casual, but the look Jarvis gave him was more eloquent: _Are you up to this?_

Daniel offered him a smile -- tight, but genuine -- and limped forward, trying not to get his leg tangled up with the crutch while leaning in an unfamiliar direction. "Let's give her some backup. Ready to use that crowbar?"

"Nothing would give me more pleasure."


	27. Bored pregnant Peggy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: _PeggySous. Peggy secretly doing background checks on the new neighbors (With the help of Rose) after they move into their new home. And Daniel catching her doing it._ [Originally posted here.](http://sholiofic.tumblr.com/post/146927840078/prompt-peggysous-peggy-secretly-doing-background)

From the doorway to the living room, Daniel watched his beautiful bride with her head bent over a case file. Eight months pregnant, and therefore out of the field, she still never seemed to slow down. Of course, there was always more than enough work to do, with the newly formed SHIELD agency now in full operation.

"You should come to bed," he said, and Peggy jumped and nearly dropped the file before quickly flipping the cover shut. "Don't pregnant women need a lot of sleep? You were exhausted a few months ago."

"Well, now I can't lie down without feeling as if there's a rhinoceros sitting on me," she sighed, pushing the file aside and rubbing her eyes.

"That's a fine way to talk about our baby." He limped over and sat on the couch beside her. Peggy leaned against him. "You know, you're supposed to be on light duty. In fact, you're supposed to be _off_ duty, though I guess that was too much to hope for."

"It's nothing important," Peggy said, kissing his cheek. "Just finishing up a few things."

"Can I help?" Daniel asked. "Two people can make the work go twice as fast."

Peggy laid a hand on the file she'd been reading. "No, you should sleep. I'll be in shortly."

Daniel had seen that kind of behavior from her before, and now his alarm bells were ringing. "Which case are you working on, exactly?" He and Jack were co-running the new SHIELD agency while Peggy was out with her pregnancy, and he knew _he_ hadn't given her anything.

"Oh ... one of the open ones ..."

The amazing thing about Peggy was that, as good as she was at fooling people in the field, she was abominable at lying. Daniel reached quickly for one of the other folders on the coffee table. Peggy made a lunge for it, but he was too fast for her, and leaned away from her to open it. Peggy tried to climb over him, but was encumbered by her current physical state.

"Hanshaw, Frances and Bill," Daniel read. "Is this ... a dossier on our neighbors across the street?"

"Give me that file, Daniel, if you would be so kind."

"What are the rest of these?" He opened another one. "The Mendozas ... the Ludlows ... Do you have a file on every one of our neighbors? Wait, are these _surveillance photos?"_

"That florist's van was parked in front of the Ludlow house every afternoon for three days," Peggy said primly.

"I'm sure there's a perfectly innocent explanation." He flipped a page. "And this is little Billy Hanshaw on his paper route. Really, Peg?"

"I've seen him crawling under the Robinsons' hedge twice. Goodness knows what he's getting up to under there."

"Retrieving badly thrown papers would be my guess." Daniel opened another folder. "Oh come on, you have a file on the Mendozas' _dog?"_

"Dogs can easily be trained to assist with covert operations, and I have witnessed some very odd behavior from that dog," Peggy retorted. "I never realized how much suspicious activity goes on in this neighborhood until I was home all day."

"Heaven help us all," Daniel sighed. "Okay, in the morning I'm talking to Jack and we're going to make sure you have a project, light duty or not."


	28. Jack, Peggy, & Daniel go fishing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For the prompt: _Jack, Daniel and Peggy go fishing._ [Originally posted here.](http://sholiofic.tumblr.com/post/146928234063/prompt-jack-daniel-and-peggy-go-fishing)

Mist lay low across the small mountain lake as dawn brightened the cloudy sky. All the houses and high-end lodges along the lakefront were quiet at this hour. The only movement was a small rowboat drifting slowly along the gray surface of the lake, in and out of the bands of mist, and the only sounds were quiet bickering coming from the boat.

"You call that paddling? We need to get closer. I'm trying to take pictures here."

"I have a better idea, Jack. Why don't you give _me_ the camera and I shove this paddle up your --"

"Why don't both of you be quiet before someone hears you," Peggy hissed, lowering a pair of binoculars.

"You know, no one is going to believe we're out here fishing if we don't put at least one of these poles in the water," Daniel said with a pointed look at the other two from under his floppy-brimmed hat. All three of them were dressed as fishermen, or at least as what they thought fishermen ought to look like. Peggy was wearing a man's shirt with rolled-up sleeves.

"Be my guest, Sousa. Poles are over there."

The morning breeze stiffened and the boat began rotating slowly. 

"Come on, Sousa, my grandmother can row better than this."

"I swear to God, Jack, I'm five seconds from pushing you in ..."

Peggy lowered the binoculars, counted quickly to ten, and said, "Switch off, both of you. It's Jack's turn to row. Daniel, I can see movement on that balcony to the left. Try to get a picture of it, if you can through all this bloody fog."

"I hate to say it," Jack said as he took the oars, "but Sousa's right about the fishing poles. And since he's got the camera, Peggy, it looks like you get to troll for trout."

"My mother would be so proud," Peggy sighed, reaching for a pole.

"Hey guys." Daniel lowered the camera and looked up. "Did anyone else just feel a raindrop?"

A moment later, the leaden sky opened up and rain poured down, riffling the surface of the lake. Daniel whipped off his hat and covered the expensive SSR camera with it; his hair was plastered down in moments. The shore was nearly invisible now behind a wall of rain, the houses visible only as ghostly outlines.

"You know," Jack said into their bedraggled and miserable silence, "for the record, _I_ wanted to case the suspect's house from the road."


	29. Peggy brings a knife to a gun fight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For the prompt: _Peggy brings a knife to a gun fight._ (Which may be one of my favorite Peggy prompts of all time.) [Originally posted here.](http://sholiofic.tumblr.com/post/146991289388/prompt-peggy-brings-a-knife-to-a-gun-fight)

The click of Peggy's heels echoed in the empty, badly lit interior of the warehouse. She stopped as two goons came out of the shadows, guns pointed at her.

"Drop the purse, sister. Kick it over here."

"I'd like to see my friends," Peggy replied, her voice cold.

"First we need to know you ain't packin', or we put a bullet in that pretty skull."

She stared at him, and then let the purse fall, and gave it a sharp kick that sent it sliding across the concrete floor. Teeth clenched, she submitted to a rough pat-down that paid special attention to her chest area.

"I don't have a gun," she said. "And I'm alone. Your boss made it very clear over the phone what the consequences would be if those conditions were not met. So ... I'm here. Where are they?"

"The famed Agent Carter," a voice sneered from the shadows, and the mobster known as "Big Boy" Agosti swaggered out into the light. "Don't look like much, do you, sweetheart? You've been causing a lot of problems for me lately."

"You brought the problems," she returned flatly. "You don't own the West Coast, Agosti, and the SSR wouldn't have bothered you if you hadn't begun interfering in _our_ operations. Now, I want to see Chief Sousa and Chief Thompson, and they had best be unharmed."

Agosti glanced over his shoulder and jerked his head meaningfully. Another small cluster of oversized and over-muscled goons dragged the two hostages into the light. Both had been roughed up, but they were on their feet (foot, in Daniel's case; he didn't have the crutch and his leg was missing) and while they were both swaying a little, neither seemed to be terribly out of it or bleeding more than slightly.

"Peggy, no," Daniel said. It came out close to a groan.

"I trust you're both well," Peggy said, her voice a little tight.

"Don't we look well?" Jack inquired. His sarcasm was dampened somewhat by the swelling around his mouth; the words came out slurred.

Peggy gave Agosti a narrow-eyed look.

And then she moved. She lashed out at the man standing nearest to her, driving her chunky heel hard into his groin, and as he went down, she reached under her skirt, pulled out a knife, and threw it with unerring accuracy into the hand of the man who had just started to aim a gun at her.

Neither of the hostages were slow on the uptake; both took advantage of the opportunity to throw themselves at their guards, and they went down in a thrashing tangle of limbs.

Agosti could only stare in shock and disbelief as Peggy rained down unholy hell on the half-dozen men in her immediate vicinity, beating them with slats of wood, chunks of concrete, and their own weapons. She found a chance to retrieve the knife from the hand of her victim (after kicking him in the face) and threw it across the room. It flipped end over end and clattered on the floor near Daniel's shoe.

By the time she was done, with a few extra stomps for Agosti, the hostages had cut themselves free and Jack was propping up Daniel on the missing-leg side.

"I'm starting to think I know now what I missed seeing when you took out all those Washington guys last year," Daniel said, as Peggy threw an arm around his neck and pecked him carefully on the bruised corner of his mouth. Jack squeezed her arm and she gave him a fast half-hug with her free arm, a squeeze around the waist so light it was almost not there at all, before letting go.

"What did you do with my -- ah." She picked up the knife, wiped it on her skirt, and leaned down to resheathe it in a quick motion that made both men's eyes widen a bit. "A good throwing knife is worth its weight in gold. Dernier taught me that." She scooped up a shotgun from one of the unconscious goons, and used it to cover their rear. "Now, Daniel, let's retrieve your missing ... things, and my handbag, and get out of this place."


	30. OT3 in bed, cuddly h/c

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: _OT3, in bed, something happy._ [Originally posted on tumblr.](http://sholiofic.tumblr.com/post/146994671853/prompt-from-recessional-ot3-in-bed-something)

Daniel is missing for three days before they get him back. He's bruised and sore and dirty, and sulky about losing an expensive custom-fitted prosthetic leg (he'll have to make do for awhile with the backup one, an older medical prosthesis that's heavy and clunky, which he hates).

But he's _here_ , and he's in reasonably decent shape, a little underfed and suffering from a few beatings, but Peggy's seen worse (she's seen so much worse).

They make it through the debrief somehow, with Daniel self-effacing and sarcastic by turns, and surreptitiously trying not to scratch under the collar of the jumper someone gave him to wear over the top of his filthy T-shirt. And Jack is completely closed off the whole time, overreacting the other way, with arms folded and hip leaned against the wall, tightly casual and almost abrasive with his questions, while Peggy shoots him occasional dagger-glares (which he avoids) to remind him to rein it in a bit.

But then it's over, and they can gather up Daniel and take him home.

 

***

 

"I just want to sleep," he says in the car, slumped on Peggy in the backseat while Jack drives. They did feed him at the SSR, at least -- a light meal of soup and toast, but now he's dragging, half asleep on her shoulder when they pull up at the Stark estate. It's the small hours of dawn, with the Jarvises long since in bed.

Daniel has his own place, and Jack technically lives in New York, and Peggy lives here -- but there's nothing about their lives right now that isn't a tangled mess, so it doesn't seem odd (to her, at least) to hustle Daniel quickly and quietly down the halls of the sleeping mansion, into Peggy's suite with its enormous bed and attached bath.

"We're washing you before you're allowed in Peggy's bed," Jack says flatly. "Where were they keeping you, a stable?"

Daniel mumbles something back that sounds both sleepy and insulting, but he allows himself to be stripped naked in the bathroom, and manhandled into the huge bathtub with the two of them. Everything Howard owns is extravagantly overdone, and so it is no problem for the bathtub to accommodate all three of them, with Jack sitting naked on the tiled edge behind Daniel, and Peggy in the sudsy water between Daniel's legs.

"I feel ridiculous," Daniel murmurs as he tips back his head while Jack rubs soapy hands through his dark curls.

"Ridiculous," Peggy informs him, "would be giving the rest of us lice." She is as careful as she can be with the bruises turning purple and green on his ribs, on his chest and shoulder, and wishes she'd kicked a few more people a little harder when they were getting him out. However, she finds an intriguing kind of distraction in exploring Howard's diverse array of bath products, scented with various floral and citrus essences. Daniel is too sleepy and accommodating to object to having them tested on him.

Finally, when he is scrubbed and loofahed and soaped to within an inch of his life (or at least his skin), they drag him out of the scummy water and towel him dry. He's legless and limping, but with two people holding onto him, it doesn't matter; they haul him off to the bed and Daniel wilts where they put him. He's still exhausted, as if he didn't sleep for the last three days. Well, neither has Peggy, and she's pretty sure Jack didn't either.

They fall into bed damp and weary and smelling like a tropical garden, courtesy of Howard. Peggy expects Daniel to be out as soon as he hits the pillow, but he flinches, eyes open, and from that she knows that there are still things he's not talking about -- that he didn't talk about in the SSR debrief either.

But Jack's on his other side, throwing an arm across him, and Peggy nests close, pressing her body against the damp and naked curve of his rib cage. Daniel draws a helpless breath, and Peggy kisses the question, the complaint, off his lips. On his other side, Jack presses his face into the back of Daniel's head, where wet dark hair is curling riotously without the flattening action of Brylcreem to contain it.

"Just sleep," Peggy says, and she isn't sure if she's speaking to one of them, or both of them, or to herself. But she kisses Daniel until his mouth slackens towards sleep, and then she presses into him, while Jack curls close on the other side. 

When it's only the two of them, she and Jack are a sharp and volatile combination (and they've learned this anew while searching for Daniel, tearing each other with sharp claws in their worry). But somehow those small and petty hurts never seem to last. She lifts her head long enough to meet his eyes over Daniel's back, and he reaches out to brush her face with the side of his hand. 

"He'll be all right," Jack whispers, eyes soft on hers.

"Of course he will," Daniel murmurs back, not asleep after all, and there's a small scuffle she can't quite track -- one of them punches the other, she isn't sure exactly who -- but then things settle down and Jack's hand finds hers, over the muscular curve of Daniel's spine.

Oh, if she could only keep them safe forever, but life has never granted her that boon.

So all she can do is fall into Daniel now, into the smell of him and the feel of him, and the strength of Jack's hand on hers, keeping her grounded with bone and sinew while they both wrap around him, as if the cage of their bodies could be enough to hold back the world. 

And maybe, for some short time, it can.


	31. 2x09 AU in the desert

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For the fic prompt: AU- What if Vernon Masters's agents didn't find Daniel, Jack, and Samberly in the desert in episode 9 and so they had to try walking home? [Originally posted on Tumblr.](http://sholiofic.tumblr.com/post/148234414123/for-the-fic-prompts-au-what-if-vernon-masterss)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I haven't updated this since July(!!), so I'm adding a bunch more ficlets tonight, mostly from Tumblr, written from prompts in the back half of 2016.

It turned out that the comment about drinking urine was only the beginning. Samberly was a font of unhelpful survival suggestions.

"We should dig for water."

"Using what?" Jack inquired, slogging along with his jacket slung over his arm. They had almost nothing, just the clothes on their backs, two guns, and a handful of small items in their pockets. They'd abandoned the gamma cannon almost immediately, discovering that its wheels bogged down instantly in sand and rocks; it was suicidal to try to take it with them.

"I think it should be possible to construct a digging apparatus from sticks to utilize the local wind power."

"Be my guest."

Ten minutes later: "Moss grows on the north sides of trees. That's how you keep going in a straight line when you're lost in the wilderness."

Daniel glanced around. "Do you see any trees? Or moss for that matter?"

Jack pointed at the road ahead of them, unwinding across the hills like a dusty tan ribbon. "We're not _lost._ We're just miles from anywhere. There's a difference."

After a moment's thoughtful silence, Samberly came back with, "If you put two pebbles in your mouth, it'll make you less thirsty."

The other two shared a glance. "How is _that_ supposed to work?" Daniel asked.

"It's something to do with ... rocks, and saliva glands ..." Samberly threw his hands in the air. "I'm an engineer, not a biologist!"

"The real question is, if we put rocks in _your_ mouth, will it stop you from talking?" Jack wanted to know.

"That's hurtful. That's very hurtful."

The sun was merciless, the desert shimmering quietly in the heat. Walking conditions were better along the shoulder of the road, but there was no shade anywhere nearby. Daniel's tongue felt like it was stuck to the roof of his mouth. The stump of his leg had gone beyond aching, through feeling pinched and sore, to outright screaming pain; his hips and the shoulder of his crutch arm were agonizingly sore, and he felt like he was rubbing blisters on his crutch hand. He knew he'd been slowing down for the last couple of hours, and suspected the other two could have made better time without him.

But they kept pace with him, both of them; neither tried to outdistance him, and neither said a word about it.

He tried not to worry too desperately about Peggy. Tried to tell himself that if she hadn't come back for him, for them, it didn't mean she was hurt or dead. Anything could have happened. Maybe she had been captured, or ...

... or _what_ , was the problem. Loyalty was one of Peggy's overriding traits. There were very few things that would cause her to abandon any of her friends. And given the people they were dealing with, most of the options were fairly dire.

There was also the matter of the company he was keeping. Daniel darted sideways glances at Jack. It was even harder than usual to tell what he was thinking. Yesterday they'd been on opposite sides; today they were ... what?

Samberly consistently trampled Daniel's last nerve, but at least Daniel knew where Samberly's loyalties stood.

And neither of them had tried to leave him behind. That meant more than it probably ought to.

They stopped to rest more frequently as the shadows began to lengthen and purple. Thirst was a torment, and Daniel didn't like how lightheaded he'd become, or the way Jack was looking splotchy with a combination of sunburn and pallor. And now he was also thinking about how cold it could get at night in the desert, the sudden chill when the sun went down -- something he'd been unprepared for, moving to this coast, when he was used to New York's damp, warm summer nights.

"I think we might be in trouble," he said quietly to Jack on one of those stops. Samberly was out of earshot, over by the road attempting to construct some sort of complicated signaling device using sticks, Jack's tie, and a shiny rock.

"Ya think?" Jack asked sardonically, dumping sand out of his shoe. His lips were cracked; he ran his tongue over them reflexively.

"Bet you wish you'd picked the other side now." It was out before Daniel could stop it.

There was a long silence, long enough that he didn't think Jack was going to say anything. Then Jack said abruptly, "No, I don't."

He was up before Daniel could say anything, picking up his jacket and slogging back up to the road to collect Samberly.

Daniel sat there for another minute or two, a lot of thoughts chasing each other around and around in his head: thoughts about loyalty and habit, about Vernon Masters and the kinds of ways that growing up surrounded by people like that could twist a person up, and how difficult it must be to untwist all those different threads when that was all you'd ever known, especially if you didn't have anybody to show you how. How much determination it must take to try to find your own decency and moral backbone when you didn’t even know what those things were supposed to feel like.

Then he levered himself painfully to his feet and grabbed his jacket. There couldn't be more than a few hours' worth of walking to go. Every step felt like it drove a spike into his leg, but he'd lived through worse, and he'd just be damned if that son of a bitch Masters was going to win this round.


	32. Daniel Midnight Oil missing scene

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For the prompt: _Could you write a missing scene after Daniel is exposed to Midnight Oil? Either before he comes to his senses in the hospital, or after he wakes up (and is still tied to the bed)?_ [Originally posted on Tumblr.](http://sholiofic.tumblr.com/post/148325970583/could-you-write-a-missing-scene-after-daniel-is)

Daniel was as restrained as they could make him, handcuffed and also bound securely with electrical cables. He was completely limp, his head lolling as Peggy and two SSR agents manhandled him into the back of a car for the trip to the hospital. His breath came in quick shallow gasps, with an odd underlying raspiness. Seeing him so helpless made Peggy's stomach twist horribly, especially not knowing what had happened to him, or how much worse it was likely to get. 

But there was nothing she could do. No way she could help, except by letting those who _could_ help him do their jobs. 

"Put a guard on him in hospital," she told the agents. She was prepared for a struggle, but to her surprise, all she got was a nod.

The events of the past few hours had turned the entire office upside down. Dooley was dead and everything was in disarray; no one really seemed to be in charge at the moment, and Peggy had a feeling that most people were simply looking for someone, _anyone,_ to tell them what to do.

She watched the SSR car carrying Daniel pull out, weaving around the other emergency vehicles jamming the street, and then went back into the building. She had to steel herself to enter the theatre where Daniel had been taken down. It had been oppressive before -- the close, stale air heavy with an unpleasant mix of smells, popcorn and sweat and perfume and a stink that was all too familiar from the war: the smell of human blood and fear. Now it was even worse, because _something_ had gotten Daniel; was it safe for any of them to be in the vicinity?

She found Thompson supervising a search of the rows of seats around where Daniel had gone down. "Got something," he crowed triumphantly when he saw her, and pointed at a bundle on one of the seats. To Peggy it looked like a bundle of various jackets and other clothing items.

"What is it?"

"One of the cops found a canister under the seats. We've got it wrapped up as much as we can." Jack picked his way around spilled popcorn and abandoned items of clothing to her. The red marks from Daniel's fingers were fading on his throat. "Lab's on its way over with more secure containment. And guess what we found on the canister?"

Peggy shook her head impatiently.

"Stark's logo."

"The missing crate 17," she murmured.

"Guess we know what it does now." 

They both looked around the theatre; Peggy's eyes went to the broken light on the floor, knocked over when Daniel had flung her off him.

Thompson cleared his throat. "How's Sousa doing?" 

"He was still out when I last saw him. Agents Mathis and Lovell are driving him to the hospital."

She didn't think she looked _that_ worried, so it was a little surprising when Jack flashed her a quick smile. "Sousa's tough. He'll be fine." Jack rubbed idly at the bruises on his neck. "Even if he did attack a federal agent."

"Two federal agents," she reminded him.

"Did he give you a shiner? Let me see."

Peggy jerked her head out of reach. "Do we know how many canisters were in the crate?"

"Didn't ask. I'll find out when the lab boys get here." He nodded to the rows of seats. "Wanna take the left quadrant?"

A search of the theatre turned up no more canisters, though Peggy lingered over a baby carriage that had rolled to rest against the stopper below the blank white expanse of the movie screen. "Jack, there were no children amongst the dead, were there?"

"No," Jack said, strolling down the aisle to join her, with his hands shoved in his pockets. "Thank God. It was a romance picture. Mostly couples and old people."

"So what is a baby carriage doing here?"

"Huh. Dunno. Think it's important?"

"I don't know." Peggy had to stop herself from rubbing her temples, where a headache was coalescing. It had been a _very_ long day. Days, rather ... she'd been in the SSR lockup overnight. She couldn't remember the last time she'd slept.

But there was no time for that now. They had Russian agents on the loose in the city with an extremely dangerous weapon, and Daniel hurt, or perhaps worse; she had to force herself not to wonder what was going on with him at the moment.

"We should canvass the area for witnesses," she said. "Someone might have seen Dottie or Ivchenko leave the building."

"They'll be long gone."

"I'm well aware of that, Agent Thompson, but they're in this city right now, somewhere, no doubt planning another attack like this one. Or perhaps putting something into motion even now."

"I know." He sat down on the arm of one of the seats, shoulders slumping slightly; the bright, in-control mask he'd been wearing slipped, and in that instant she saw her own weariness reflected and, perhaps, redoubled.

It had indeed been a very long, difficult, miserable day. For all of them.

"But we'll be no good to anyone if we burn ourselves out," she said, leaning against the seat opposite. "The scene is contained. Let's take an hour or so, get something to eat and perhaps a little rest."

Jack looked up; his weary gaze had dropped to the stained carpet, but now there was a glimmer of his sly little-boy smile. "Let me guess. You'll be at the hospital."

 _"Someone_ should check on Agent Sousa," she said tartly, not liking to admit that she had in fact been thinking of it.

"Didn't mean anything by it, Marge."

"Nor did I," she sighed. "Yes, I think we could all use a break."

"Hey, Peggy?"

She'd started to walk away, but turned back, surprised. He rarely used her name.

"Watch your back," Jack said. "They're out there, and they're gunning for us."

"You too." She had a moment's flash of memory -- the way he'd run to Daniel's side earlier, that unexpected flare of concern -- and she added, "I'll call the office when there's news on Agent Sousa."

He gave her a thin, acknowledging smile, and Peggy left the theatre for the cleaner, less cloying air outside. Perhaps she'd stop by the hospital first. Just for a few minutes.

Daniel _would_ be all right. And if not, there'd be hell to pay.


	33. Peggy at the SSR without Daniel

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: _Peggy feels conflicted about Daniel having left for California. Jack is unhelpful._ [Originally posted on Tumblr.](http://sholiofic.tumblr.com/post/148342112783/prompt-peggy-feels-conflicted-about-daniel-having)

Peggy was unprepared for how strange it was to be at the SSR without Daniel.

She hadn't expected it. Hadn't even thought about it in those terms, not quite. It was only that Daniel had always been there, from the very beginning, a quiet presence in the background of her world. She hadn't even really noticed him at first, and she couldn't remember, now, under what circumstances they'd first been introduced to each other -- though it frustrated her greatly that she could not. He'd simply always been there. And as she'd come to know him, his jokes and sympathy and just the bloody _respect_ he offered her had been like a drink of fresh water in the desert, compared to the other agents' slights and dismissals and petty cruelties.

Even now, with both of them taking field assignments and receiving a good deal more consideration from their colleagues than in the old days, she'd still relied on Daniel for general commiseration about, among other things, Jack Thompson's reign of terror (actually much less terrible than they'd both feared; there were still times Peggy wanted to punch him in the nose, but he was actually good at his new job). But it had been nice to have someone to laugh about things with. She was sometimes aware of a reserve in Daniel that she didn't remember from before, but she reminded herself that there had been a lot of awkward water under the bridge, with the entire Stark affair, and their small and petty betrayals of each other. It was only understandable that it would take them awhile to find their footing again.

And then he was gone.

It would help if he'd only return her calls. Maybe then his absence wouldn't have felt so strange, like a sore place she had to keep poking at. They hadn't even worked together that often in the field; most days they saw each other only in passing, making a quick joke over the office coffee pot or a casual comment as they passed in the file room. Maybe it wouldn't have left her so off-balance not to have him there if she had a chance to talk to him on the phone every once in a while.

But of course he was busy, she thought. He must be running himself ragged, setting up an entire office from scratch.

"And how is Chief Sousa's new bureau coming along?" she asked Jack while preparing a cup of tea over the gas burner in the office canteen, as morning sunshine streamed through the office windows. Jack had actually been making coffee when she'd walked in. Peggy had obstinately decided that she was not going to make coffee anymore unless directly ordered (she didn't even drink the stuff herself) and so far, no one had. Probably the fact that she'd taken down an entire team of trained agents when they showed up to arrest her had something to do with that.

"What, you two don't talk anymore?" he asked, dropping a lump of sugar into his cup.

"If you haven't the information, my mistake ..."

"Someone's testy this morning," Jack remarked, reaching for a spoon. "Didn't you have a possible Underwood sighting in SoHo yesterday? I'd think that'd be enough to keep you cheerful as a cricket for days."

"I am perfectly cheerful, thank you." 

"Yes, I could tell," Jack said brightly over the rim of his coffee cup. "To answer your question, it's nothing but complaints -- the usual things ... can't find qualified people anywhere, he says; I'm thinking about sending him Greenwood, teach him what he really has to complain about ..."

"Oh, _Jack."_ Agent Frank Greenwood made Ray Krzeminski look like a marvel of efficiency and charm.

"Well, that'll teach him to try to siphon off _my_ talent -- Hey, where are you off to?"

"Working," she tossed over her shoulder. "Dottie Underwood waits for no one."

"Want me to say hi to Sousa for you, Carter?" 

"Not at all necessary, thank you," she snapped over her shoulder. _As if_.

Though it really might be thoughtful if Daniel called to speak to someone other than Chief Thompson every once in awhile. If he could find the time.

Which perhaps he couldn't. So she wasn't going to worry about it.

Much.


	34. Highlander fusion sequel

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For a prompt asking for more in the [Little Deaths](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6716452) 'verse (a Highlander fusion in which Peggy and Jack are Immortals and Daniel is Peggy's Watcher). [Originally posted on Tumblr.](http://sholiofic.tumblr.com/post/148379424093/could-you-do-something-to-continue-your-little)

“You are ridiculous,” Peggy snapped, fishing Jack's body out of the roiling water at the base of the waterfall and dragging him into the boat.

“He can't hear you,” Daniel pointed out.

“I know that.” She draped Jack’s waterlogged corpse over the gunwale to let some of the water drain out. Coming back to life after being drowned could be rather unpleasant, as she knew from experience. “I am simply preparing for when he _can_ hear me.”

“Oh, come on,” Daniel said. “Testing their body’s new limits is something that a lot of young Immortals do. In fact, I’ll remind you that I’ve read your Chronicle, and I happen to know that your record isn’t precisely spotless in that area.” 

Peggy chose not to acknowledge this. “Just row,” she said irritably, dumping Jack into the bottom of the boat without much concern for whether all of his limbs ended up in the right orientation.

Daniel plied the oars with a grin. “It’s different when you’re responsible for them, isn’t it?”

“I am not responsible for him. In fact, as far as the mortal world is concerned, he’s still my boss.”

The boat grounded on a gravel bar downstream of the waterfall, and Peggy hopped out to drag it ashore. Daniel helped her manhandle Jack out of the boat onto a patch of grass. He woke up as they were doing this, coming back to life with a sharp gasp.

Peggy made sure not to drop him too gently. “I hope you’re satisfied,” she remarked, brushing down the damp tails of her blouse. “Idiot.”

Jack blinked up at the sky, then propped himself on his elbow and grinned at her. “That was _amazing_. Did you see that?”

“What, you killing yourself?” She gave Daniel a hand out of the boat. “Yes, we all saw it.”

“Isn’t it still a little unpleasant, though?” Daniel asked, leaning back into the boat to retrieve his crutch. “Dying, I mean. Doesn’t it hurt?”

“Hurt like hell,” Jack said cheerily. “But the last ten seconds before that part were _amazing_.” He tried to stand up and nearly fell over. Peggy reached out one hand to catch him with a long-suffering expression. 

“You’ll be shaky for a few minutes after you come back to life. Do try not to fall in the river and make us fish you out again.”

“Let’s find another cliff,” Jack said.

“Let’s _really_ not.”

“Hey, you were the one who wanted to come out in the woods and train.”

“Swords,” Peggy said. “Train with _swords_.”

“I don’t know about you two, but I could eat,” Daniel put in. “How about I make a campfire and we see what the fishing is like around here?”


	35. 5 times Peggy lost someone

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: _5 Times Peggy lost someone and one time she got someone back._ [Originally posted on Tumblr.](http://sholiofic.tumblr.com/post/149407030978/5-times-peggy-lost-someone-and-one-time-she-got)

**1\. Michael**

It caught her, still, in little ways. She’d hear a joke and for an instant, she’d make a mental note to tell it to Michael, before remembering (again) that she would never have an opportunity to tell Michael a bad joke and make him laugh that snorting laugh she used to tease him about. She missed him when she caught a snatch of the song that Michael taught her to dance to (the record playing on their scratchy old phonograph, hissing and popping as Michael patiently positioned her small hands and feet), or when she glimpsed a toy wagon in a shop window that made her think of the one Michael used to pull her around in when she was very small. She couldn't help thinking of him every time that she used the holds and throws that he’d taught her (for Michael was the first person who showed her how to fight, in a sibling’s rough and tumble way, long before SOE instructors or the SSR). 

The war would later bring her an up-close-and-personal experience of tragedy, a cavalcade of friends lost, until she felt she would become numb from it. But there would always be a particular hole in her heart from her first real bereavement, the first time that grief came into her world.

**2\. Steve**

When Michael died, Peggy lost her past. When Steve died, she lost her future. 

Michael's death had imbued her with new purpose, even while ripping out her heart. Losing Steve left her adrift. For a time, it was the war that kept her anchored. Then she didn't even have that, and could only throw out a fragile rope made of hope and determination, seeking new anchors on a foreign shore. Her parents, she knew, had expected her to come home after the war, but she had outgrown that life. It didn't fit her anymore. She could no longer see the shape of the future, except in the vaguest of outlines, but she knew it wasn't in Hampstead.

She understood why Howard clung to the hope of finding Steve, but Peggy had learned a very hard lesson during the war: the dead didn't come back. You just had to keep moving forward and learn to live with the holes in your heart.

**3\. Chief Dooley (and Daniel)**

Roger Dooley’s funeral was held on a dark, rainy Saturday, the mourners little more than a cluster of black umbrellas sprouting like damp mushrooms beside the gravesite.

There were a lot of people there: the entire New York SSR, it seemed, as well as a lot of friends from Dooley’s war days and his former co-workers from his job as a factory foreman before the war. His wife was there, red-eyed and white-faced, together with two solemn, huddled children, and her sister for moral support.

The newly titled Chief Thompson (interim Chief at the moment, but no one expected that he wouldn’t get the the job) stood slightly apart from the rest of the SSR. He didn't look at Peggy and Daniel; the tentative camaraderie they'd begun to enjoy during the Stark case was severed, now, by his new responsibilities as their boss, as well as by the weight of his own betrayal and guilt.

Silent in the rain, they all watched as Roger Dooley’s coffin was lowered into the ground.

Peggy hesitated as the mourners began to break up and scatter; she lingered close to Daniel, trying to be casual about it. An invitation hovered on her lips, rehearsed carefully throughout the funeral: _Do you want to get a drink?_

But Daniel spoke first. "You know," he said, looking out at the misty skyline of the city instead of her, "I put in for that new branch of the office opening up in L.A." He turned to look at her for a moment, almost shyly. "Jack thinks I'm probably gonna get it. Don't know if it's guilt or what, but I guess he put in a good word for me. It's not official yet, but ..." He trailed off, looking at her with drops of rainwater frosting his lashes, and an expression she couldn't quite read.

What else could she say? "I'm very happy for you, Daniel. I hope you get it."

**4\. Jason**

Ana's whisky helped; the companionship helped more. After the war, Peggy had almost forgotten how much it _did_ help, drinking away the memory of a lost comrade.

Ana only sipped from her glass -- it was ten in the morning, after all -- and rose eventually, brushing down her skirt. "I should get ready for my book club meeting. You are very welcome to come, if you like. I know it's not very exciting, compared to what you're used to, but last week we had a lively discussion of Hemingway. This week we are discussing Gatsby."

"I'll think about it," Peggy said, with a polite smile. She understood what Ana was trying to do, and appreciate it, but she wasn't in a mood to occupy her mind with light conversation. She needed to _do_ something.

She couldn't bring Jason back, but she could at least find out why he'd died, and who was responsible for it. 

_Keep moving forward._ It was all you could do.

**4 + 1. Jack**

"I'm not getting a pulse," she heard the doctor say, in a tense and urgent voice, as they whisked Jack beyond the doors of the operating room. Peggy stumbled, feeling it hit her like a punch in the gut, because _no,_ she was so damned tired of this --

"Peggy. Hey." Daniel caught her, and she looked up into his face. There was a dark smear along his cheekbone, a smudge of Jack's blood.

"Peggy," he said again, and took her hands, her blood-sticky hands. "He's gonna be okay. He was talking to you in the ambulance, right? That jerk is way too stubborn to die. He's gonna be making our lives difficult for decades to come, you just watch."

"I know," she said, breathless, and clasped her hands around his. Jack's blood was on him, too, splashed on the sleeves of his jacket from back at the hotel, when he'd knelt over Jack and bore down with all his strength on the wound in Jack's chest, trying to stem the flood of Jack's life as it spilled out onto the floor of the hotel room. 

"He'll be okay," Daniel told her again.

"Of course he will," she said, pulling herself together. Ana was doing very well, she reminded herself, and Jason was starting his job with Howard today. Sometimes people _did_ come back; not every story ended in tragedy. "And if he is not, I will _strangle_ him. We need to see about interviewing the hotel staff -- and the room should be searched properly; I do hope your men are doing it systematically, not tramping about on the evidence --"

***

When Jack woke up three days later, she shouted at him for a solid minute straight, until a nurse came in to scold her for disturbing the other patients. Jack looked weakly amused by the whole thing, and Daniel, the bastard, was laughing.

\--

**Bonus: Michael**

First she punched him. She managed to get in the first blow because he wasn't expecting it, but he caught her fist on the second swing. He had, after all, taught her most of the tricks she knew.

"You absolute _wanker,"_ Peggy snarled, fighting to free her hand, which was still trapped in his.

He only smiled at her, that same familiar smile, and when he pulled her into his arms, she went without complaint, and hugged him until his ribs creaked.

"Good Lord, you got strong," he gasped when she let him go.

"People can change a great deal in seven years, Michael." She wished her voice didn't shake, wished she was doing a better job of holding back the tears stinging her eyes. She wanted to be angry at him. It was better than feeling the other things she was feeling. "How _could_ you let us believe you were dead? How could you do that to our parents?" _And to me._

"It's a long story," he said quietly, and she looked at him, really looked at him, seeing the tracks of age and weariness on his face. He was no longer the boy she'd known. But, then, she wasn't the girl he'd grown up with, either. And she reached out, more gently this time, to take his hand.

"I'd like to hear it."


	36. Harry Potter AU

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: _Agent Carter HP AU????_ [Originally posted on Tumblr.](http://sholiofic.tumblr.com/post/149408434423/prompt-agent-carter-hp-au)

Until her fourth year at Hogwarts, Peggy mainly hung out with her fellow Gryffindors.

She was friendly with some students from other Houses, in particular Ravenclaw Howard, as well as Howard’s best friend Edwin and Edwin's girlfriend Ana, who were both in Hufflepuff.

But most of Peggy’s social circle were composed of Gryffindors. Her boyfriend Steve was a year ahead of her -- a skinny and timid boy in his first year, he’d blossomed into a star Quiddich player by his fifth. And Peggy was an integral part of Steve’s tightly knit group of friends, which included his childhood friend Bucky and a group of others whose tendencies ran towards athleticism and mostly-harmless pranks. The other students had nicknamed Steve’s group the Howling Commandos.

But then …

Then came that disastrous fourth year, and the Triwizard Tournament, and by the end of it, Peggy’s life was forever changed. Steve and Bucky were dead (though their bodies hadn’t been found, the adults weren’t holding out much hope), and their group of friends was shattered.

For the first part of her fifth year, Peggy was uncharacteristically isolated, struggling with her classes, unable to connect with her former friends, all of whom were dealing with loss and grief in her own way.

But in the second half of her fifth year, the pieces of her life started falling back together. It was the Hufflepuffs who took her in first -- Edwin and Ana, and Violet, and most particularly Daniel, who had a knack for seeking her out quietly when she was alone, finding ways to make her smile.

And then the Ravenclaws, Howard and Jason and Aloysius and Whitney. Peggy really never meant to make friends with any of them, but Howard seemed to know _everyone_ in Ravenclaw, and he threw the best parties (really the only decent parties hosted by any of the Ravenclaws) and it just seemed to happen. (She did try dating Jason but it didn't really go anywhere; they worked much better as friends.)

And even the Slytherins. She never would've thought, in her younger years when Jack was nothing to her but a popular Slytherin who used to bully her and Steve, that they'd end up sharing a night of peril by the lake and become friends. Her Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw friends looked at her a bit oddly when she began inviting a Slytherin to hang out with them, but House rivalries were nothing compared to the sheer force of Peggy's willpower.

During the summer, when Peggy was back home with her loving but baffled Muggle parents, they all wrote to her, and she wrote back.

For the first time since Steve's death, she was looking forward to going back to school.


	37. Howard builds Daniel a flamethrowing crutch

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: _Daniel + Howard + mechanical engineering + lack of boundary negotiation = ?_ [Originally posted on Tumblr.](http://sholiofic.tumblr.com/post/149830824198/daniel-howard-mechanical-engineering-lack)

"I'm not keeping it," Daniel said.

"Howard really does mean well." Privately, Peggy agreed with him. But she'd also become resigned long ago to the fact that Howard simply was going to do what Howard did, and he really did like to help his friends -- or his friends' friends, as was more the case with Daniel. He had a good heart. It was just that sometimes his efforts were aimed in unwanted directions, and more enthusiastic than the situation warranted.

"Peggy, you know, I've tried to roll with this. I didn't say anything about the built-in electrocution device in Howard's _first_ new and improved crutch, because I could see the potential mission-related applications."

"And it did come in handy, that time on the docks," Peggy pointed out. 

"Yes, it did. And I like to think I was a good sport about his attempts to improve the knee of my artificial leg."

"You were a very good sport about that," Peggy said quickly.

"Even the time when it catapulted me six feet into the air."

"You impressed all the trainee agents."

"Landing on Jack was definitely a bonus."

"I believe it did away with any lingering questions he might have had about your ability to train the new agents in hand-to-hand combat, yes."

"However," Daniel said, "I draw the line at built-in flamethrowers on _anything_ attached to my body."

Peggy frowned at the smoking, blackened target, and the gently smoking end of Daniel's crutch. "So you're taking it back to him?"

"Yes."

She looked back along the blackened trail he'd left along the SSR obstacle course. "And how many other things are you planning to set on fire first?"

"I thought I should give it a fair test." Another target popped up to his left. He lifted the crutch, squeezed the handle and skewered it with a jet of flame. "But I'm definitely not keeping it."

"No," Peggy said. "Of course you shouldn't."

"Imagine the wear and tear on floors, and the potential for setting annoying bureaucrats on fire."

"You could keep it as a heavy combat model," she pointed out. "Only for use in extremely serious situations."

"Hmmm." He casually aimed it at another target. He barely had to look this time. "Maybe I'll think about it."


	38. Dottie Underwood, wedding crasher

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: _Dottie Underwood, wedding crasher._ [Originally posted on Tumblr.](http://sholiofic.tumblr.com/post/149546318318/prompt-dottie-underwood-wedding-crasher)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one got left out of the [master list]() by accident! (I've now added it.) I was originally planning to expand it and post to AO3 as a standalone fic, but kinda never got around to it, so I'd forgotten about it until stumbling across it in my fic text doc as I was going down the master list of ficlets.

The Carter-Sousa wedding was held at Howard Stark's Los Angeles property. Howard had tried to talk Peggy into holding the ceremony in the Caribbean, but Peggy flatly refused to be married on a private island, and was unswayed by Howard's argument that he only owned _half_ the island. ("And it's a very small island!" "Howard, I said no.")

Howard had managed to get her to take his counter-offer, however. He was covering the costs of flying both Peggy and Daniel's families to L.A., and also had offered them a five-day honeymoon up the coast at a very exclusive resort -- the owner was a friend -- which Peggy accepted only because she was afraid if she didn't, he'd come up with something worse.

Apparently (and Peggy knew exactly who to blame) there was now a betting pool in the New York office to guess how long it would take before the Carter-Sousa honeymoon was derailed by crime-solving shenanigans. Jack, from all accounts, had put his money on six hours. Peggy was very tempted to place a bet herself, if she could only have figured out a way to do it anonymously from three time zones away. 

Mostly, in the run-up to the event, she tried not to think about it. There was very little preparation to do. She didn't want to be married in a creamy confection of lace and tulle, like the one she'd almost married Fred in; instead, she took a half-day to visit L.A. shops and had Ana help her pick out a simple ivory-colored sheath. She turned Rose loose on the decorations, because otherwise it was going to be either a) her mother, or b) Howard, and neither of those options bore thinking about, while she trusted that Rose would enjoy the endeavor and would come up with something tasteful and appropriate.

She started to rethink that plan when workmen arrived early on the morning of the wedding to deck the mansion in flowers, crepe, and bunting. 

"Howard is paying for it," Rose reported cheerily, having shown up early herself. 

"Of course he is," Peggy sighed.

Both families were now being hosted at the mansion -- Peggy's parents and great-aunts and several cousins (together with their families) that she hadn't seen in years, and Daniel's father and grandfather and several _more_ cousins. It was strange to see so many people wandering about the grounds: elderly British ladies making discreetly shocked comments about the heat, young men from Brooklyn affecting a casual city-kid attitude about their opulent surroundings, children trying to pull the flamingo's tail ... and quite a number of young ladies that Peggy had never seen before, and was fairly sure were not relatives of Daniel's.

"Howard."

"They're my friends," he said with wounded innocence. "You invited _your_ friends."

"Howard. I am the _bride."_

"It's good to know that you haven't forgotten," he said, casting a eye down at her light blue pantsuit.

"Oh please, the ceremony isn't until one. How long can it take to put on a dress?"

She found Daniel out in the gazebo where the ceremony was going to take place, sitting on a bench and supervising Jack, who was up on a stepladder, hanging up bunting.

"I flew all the way out to L.A. and you didn't ask me to be your best man," Jack was saying as she wandered up. "I'm feeling very unappreciated right now." 

"We aren't doing that. Peggy doesn't have a maid of honor either. It's just going to be me and Peggy up there, and -- oh, hi, Peg." Daniel's glance at her was almost shy. She couldn't be having that, so she firmly delivered herself into his personal space, and he reached up to slide an arm around her waist.

"You know, I'm no expert on weddings, but aren't you supposed to be wearing a dress?" Jack asked, smirking down at them with his arms crossed over the top of the ladder. "Or is Sousa the one who's wearing the dress?"

Daniel threw a ball of wadded-up bunting at his head, which Jack effortlessly caught. "Remind me why we invited you again?"

Peggy leaned into Daniel's side and kissed his cheek. "I don't know, _did_ we invite him? I don't recall doing so."

"Security!" Daniel cried theatrically. "Gatecrasher!"

"Hilarious," Jack said from his perch. "And here I'm risking life and limb on a ladder hanging up these damn ... whatever they are. Just for that, I'm taking your wedding present back to New York with me."

"I shudder to think what it is," Peggy said. "Although, I assure you, Howard is a difficult act to follow."

"Well, of course he is, the man probably offered to buy you a small country of your very own. Or at least a bevy of French strippers."

"Just what I always wanted. I believe they're by the puffin habitat, by the way."

"Really," Jack said, squinting across the grounds against the midmorning sun.

"We've got it from here anyway," Daniel said, tugging Peggy into his lap. "Go mingle."

"Right, so if anyone asks where you two are, I'll just tell them the guests of honor are canoodling in the gazebo. That'll clear things right up." But he hopped off the bottom rung of the stepladder, and grinned suddenly at the two of them. "I'm taking full credit for this, by the way."

"Oh God, not that again," Peggy moaned.

"You owe me for sending you to L.A.," Jack said, and strolled off, whistling.

"Actually, the depressing thing is, we probably do," Daniel said, as she rearranged herself more comfortably in his lap. "Not that he meant it that way, no matter what he claims now. Are there really French strippers by the puffin pond?"

"They are quite nice young ladies. I was speaking with them earlier. In fairness," Peggy said, "they are wearing tasteful frocks, and I believe one of them is actually French Canadian. Also, as Howard is fond of forceful women, I expect Jack will either behave himself or take an involuntary swim with the puffins."

 

***

 

The ceremony started off on a lovely note, with Peggy being delivered by her father to the flower-and-bunting-decked gazebo. (She honestly would have preferred to skip that part of the ceremony, just as she and Daniel had shed every bit of extraneous tradition they could get away with, but she could never have deprived her father of the honor of walking his only daughter down the aisle.)

The minister had just gotten to the "if any has a reason why these two should not wed" part, and Peggy was completely lost staring into Daniel's eyes, when there were sudden dual yelps of "Get down!" and a weight slammed into Peggy from the side.

She and Daniel went down under the combined weight of Jack and Rose. The startled minister wobbled to the side, and a sudden sharp sound, which Peggy took in those first stunned instants to be fireworks, echoed across the grounds; a bouquet of flowers somewhere above Peggy's head exploded in a shower of petals.

"... glint on the balcony, like a rifle scope ..." Jack was saying urgently.

"... _knew_ she wasn't a guest, the shoes were all wrong --" was Rose's fierce reply.

Another shot splintered the latticed side of the gazebo, and then the crowd of wedding guests, which was composed roughly a third of SSR agents and Daniel's former military buddies, took off in pursuit of the shooter, with Jack and Rose among them.

Peggy sat up, feeling rumpled and unusually disinclined to join them, even though she suspected who the shooter probably was -- and if so, she was long gone. Peggy looked up at the location of the wrecked flowers and perforated gazebo, and realized with a cold chill that Dottie -- if Dottie it was -- had been aiming at Daniel.

"Dottie," Daniel murmured, coming to similar conclusions.

"I expect so," Peggy sighed.

He brushed a lock of her hair out of her face. "Are you all right?"

Peggy nodded. Her throat was still tight at the thought of how close Dottie had actually come to making her a widow before she had the chance to even properly wed.

"You know," Daniel murmured, "we could simply get married while they're gone."

It was tempting enough that she couldn't help smiling thinly. But then she looked over at the remainder of the shocked and panicked wedding guests, consisting largely of terrified-looking civilians, and her smile took on rueful overtones. "There's really only one thing we should be doing right now."

By the time the law-enforcement contingent came back, holstering their guns, Peggy and Daniel had the incipient wedding guest panic under control. 

"Gone," Jack muttered under his breath, swinging close to them. His tuxedo was grass-stained, as was Rose's skirt, and blood was welling along his jawline from small cuts where he'd been lacerated by bits of flying gazebo. "We think she had a getaway car out back. Luzano and Bradshaw have thrown themselves on car-pursuit detail, and they're getting some of the other guys in from the office." 

"I'm just glad you were both _looking,"_ Daniel said, heartfelt.

Jack's grin surfaced, with a slight shakiness he couldn't hide at the possibility of what had almost been, and he clapped Daniel on the shoulder, with a nod for Peggy. "Bet you regret not asking me to be your best man now, huh?"

Daniel shot a quick look across at Peggy, who cut her eyes sideways to Rose, and smiled.

***

And so the wedding of Peggy Carter and Daniel Sousa proceeded with a slightly squashed bridal bouquet carried by freshly appointed maid of honor Rose Roberts, and the ring box which had rolled under the gazebo floor carried by newly minted best man Jack Thompson.

(Afterwards, Peggy was fully expecting Jack's wedding gift to be some sort of absurd gag gift, but it was in fact a pair of very nice, hand-tooled holsters designed to fit closely under male and female clothing. Each holster came with a concealed knife pocket, into which the throwing knives that Rose had given them fit perfectly.)

(And then they spent the next week in pursuit of Dottie. Jack was somewhat put out that he hadn't won the office pool; it was won instead by Agent Clements, notorious office prankster, who'd put in for five minutes after the ceremony -- the closest by far that anyone came to five minutes _before_ the ceremony -- and was rather shocked to receive the resulting sixteen dollars.)

(At the end of it all, they ended up getting a week’s vacation in the Caribbean, courtesy of Howard. On Howard’s very own half a private island. Peggy decided, over her pangs of conscience, that it was perfectly okay as long as no one knew about it.)

(But she forgot to take into account that they worked with a bunch of spies, which was why they came back to find Daniel's office decorated in glorious tropical tackiness, and a series of extremely tasteless postcards laid out neatly on the desk, with increasingly risque bits of doggerel in Jack's sprawling handwriting. It was, Peggy thought, a bloody good thing that he'd saved her husband's life on their wedding day, or he'd be in a lot of trouble.)

(As it was, she made sure Howard gave Jack the same Caribbean-island invitation two years later, when Jack tied the knot with one of his fellow agents at the newly formed SHIELD.)

(And then Rose too, a year after that. Peggy never forgot a debt.)


	39. Midnight Oil scene w/Daniel hurting Jack seriously

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: _Another prompt with midnight oil: Daniel hurts Jack a lot more seriously when he's under the influence of the chemical (e.g. he had access to a knife or a gun), and dealing with the aftermath_. [Originally posted on Tumblr.](http://sholiofic.tumblr.com/post/150205483313/another-prompt-with-midnight-oil-daniel-hurts)

The first clue Jack got that all wasn't well with Daniel Sousa was being grabbed by the throat and flung to the floor of the theater. He was dimly aware of Daniel whipping around to punch Peggy in the face, and took advantage of the opportunity to slam the flat of his hand against Daniel's chin. Daniel's head snapped back, and a bolt of heat drove into Jack's side. It took him a moment to realize that the bastard had _stabbed_ him.

Daniel scrambled backwards, away from them, dragging himself with one hand and the other holding a blood-covered folding knife thrust out in front of him. He was leaving a trail of blood, some of it his, some of it Jack's. His eyes were wide and terrified, locked in his own private hell.

"Daniel," Peggy said, her words slurred. She had one hand pressed to the side of her face, and was picking herself up, her attention fixed on Daniel.

Jack really thought he deserved a little more attention on _him._ He rolled over with an effort, one hand pressed to his side, the fingers wet and slick. He still couldn't quite believe Daniel Sousa, of all people, had stabbed him. It was like having a puppy bite you in the face. And he didn't have the slightest idea where to go from here. Punch him? Shoot him? Neither of those options felt right, because it really wasn't Daniel's fault -- he still wasn't sure what had kicked him over into MurderDaniel, but it clearly wasn't _Daniel_ in there -- but the blood was flowing thickly down his side, and someone had better do _something_ \--

Then one of the cops coshed Daniel in the back of the head, and he went facefirst into the plush carpet of the theater floor. There was a traitorous part of Jack that freaked out a little at the sight of Daniel crumpling forward as if his bones had turned to water ( _you can't break his brain, he needs that_ ) but at the same time the whole building seemed to be tilting sideways and he had to catch himself on the floor.

"Jack, lie down," Peggy was saying, kneeling over him, and he did it by instinct. Somehow it was hard not to do react when Peggy gave orders. She would have been a natural drill sergeant if she'd been a little more favored in the Y-chromosome area.

Her small, strong hands pressed down hard on his abdomen, and he jerked back, gasping.

"Settle down, man, you're bleeding," she said.

"I noticed that," he gasped. "Is Sousa dead?" Which wasn't exactly how he'd intended to phrase it, and the visible flash of pain that waltzed across her face reminded him sharply of this fact, but dammit, he'd been _stabbed._

"I don't think so," she said. "Please try to stop squirming."

 _Yeah? Well, please try to stop jabbing me in the side with a hot poker,_ he wanted to say, but he passed out before he could.

***

He woke up dazed and thirsty and ill. He got some water from a nurse, and some drugs from a different nurse, and then Agents Teller and Redmond came in, and he was able to let go of his flirty getting-nice-things-from-nurses persona and get some concrete information on the drug that had turned Sousa and a few dozen theater patrons into homicidal maniacs. Not that anyone really knew a whole lot yet. On the other hand, it was better than thinking about the last thing that he'd seen right before getting attacked by Daniel, which was Dooley dying spectacularly in front of the whole office. He was busy trying not to think about that when Peggy came in, still wearing the same dark-blue suit she'd been wearing the last time he saw her, with a bruise fading on her jaw.

"Jack," she said, sitting down rather hesitantly at his bedside.

"Peggy," he returned. "I hope Sousa is sorry for stabbing me." _And also alive._ He really wasn't sure if he could handle anybody else dying on his watch right now.

"He actually wants to see you. He's one floor up," she said.

Oh right, it only made sense that they'd ended up in the same hospital. "I really hope he doesn't expect me to walk all the way up there, seeing how he shoved a knife in my ribs about eight hours ago."

"No, he wants to come down and see you. As it happens," she said, "I'm sounding things out to see if you'd be agreeable to that."

"Sure, why not."

Peggy flashed him a quick smile -- which annoyingly had the side effect of making him actually feel better, a little -- and left. He was then left alone for long enough that he was thinking about falling asleep when there was a light tap on the door to his room and Sousa hesitantly crutched in.

"Hey, killer," Jack said, and Sousa blanched, so maybe it wasn't quite time to joke about it yet. Jack reached out to tap the arm of the chair beside his bed. "Come on, sit down." 

Sousa did so, cautiously. "I can't believe I did any of the things I did in there," he said. "I ... _hit_ Peg -- Carter."

Ah yes, the crush was alive and well, obviously. "And you _stabbed_ me," Jack pointed out, in case the important part had been overlooked. Carter didn't even have a black eye. She was fine.

"I _know_ that," Sousa said, his expression a weird blend of irritation and sheer misery.

Oh God, it was worse than he'd feared: he just couldn't resent someone who looked like he'd been stomped on. Besides, he also knew it wasn't Daniel's fault, as tempting as it was to find someone to blame. "For God's sake, it's Ivchenko and Underwood, not you," Jack said. "They're the ones who gassed a few dozen people. And --" He stopped, and cursed eloquently. "And they've got a whole crate of everyone's favorite psycho drug."

"The SSR is out looking." Sousa glanced at the door. "Look, Jack. I think we all know you're in charge --"

"I think we all know I'm flat on my back in a hospital bed," Jack pointed out. "For now, you and Carter take this one."

Sousa's head snapped back; he gave Jack an odd look. "Say what, now?"

"Look, you've got a good head, and Carter's got experience. Between the two of you, you can probably manage not to make things even worse. Go get the bastards. If anyone complains about you giving them orders, have them talk to me."

Sousa looked slightly dazed. "Yeah," he said. "On it." He lurched out of the chair, leaning on his crutch, and Jack had to remind himself that Sousa was actually the only person they knew, so far, who'd gone up against Underwood and lived to tell the tale.

At the door, Sousa paused and looked back, and his crooked grin was back to usual Daniel Sousa. "Glad I didn't kill you," he said.

"Yeah, _me too."_ As Sousa turned to leave, Jack called after him, with as much volume as he could muster, "I expect to be kept in the loop on all of this!"

Sousa raised a hand in acknowledgement, and crutched out. Jack watched him go. The weird thing was, he was pretty sure they'd do okay. And strangely enough, of all the orders he'd given since Dooley had started putting him in charge of things, this was the first one that actually made him feel like a leader.


	40. Dottie has a spa day

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: _When Dottie disappeared in s2, my sister and I came up with a sort of running joke that she went off to the spa and had a much-deserved, very long spa day. Do you think you could work this into a story somehow?_ [Originally posted on Tumblr.](http://sholiofic.tumblr.com/post/150484429943/when-dottie-disappeared-in-s2-my-sister-and-i)

As much as Dottie liked to hope for victory, she was also a woman who prepared for all contingencies, and it seemed that any confrontation with Peggy had a good chance of leaving her somewhat the worse for wear. Last year, she'd barely limped away after falling through a plate-glass window onto the wing of a plane. Lacking a proper exit plan, she'd been forced to hole up in a safehouse made from a converted bootlegger's tunnel, eating military rations for a week and a half, until she was well enough to put on a disguise and go outside without drawing attention.

She had absolutely no intention of doing that again, which was why she'd made sure to cultivate contacts who had much nicer escape options to provide. Granted, being buried in a top-secret federal prison had put a bit of a damper on that, but any prison had a flow of information and money going in and out (it was just a matter of finding the most bribable guards), and she'd managed to keep her resources up-to-date.

Therefore, _this_ time when she staggered away from yet another fight that hadn't gone her way, feeling like her internal organs were full of broken glass, her destination was not a sewer or a bunker, but a very exclusive Malibu resort that catered to mobsters' daughters and ex-wives, movie starlets hiding from the press while recovering from bouts of alcoholism, drug addiction, or messy divorces, minor foreign royalty who were persona non grata in their own countries, and that kind of thing. Basically it was a very nice place for the mostly-female clientele to hide out and be pampered, while defended by a barrier consisting of excellent security and a lot of money.

Not an eyebrow was raised when Irina Petrovna, daughter of an extremely minor strand of Russian nobility living in exile since the revolution, limped up the driveway in a bedraggled party dress, with a story about having been beaten up by her now ex-boyfriend and needing a private, secure place to recuperate, away from the eyes of the media or her ex's well-connected family. They'd seen worse. Soon Irina was nursing her bruises in a private spa tub and wondering how soon she might feel well enough to enjoy the attentions of the resort's world-class masseuses. (Most of them were male, young and well-built ... but not all of them, and Irina had her eye on a dark-haired, muscular-armed woman who just might bear a certain resemblance to a particular SSR agent.)

Next time, she thought, and snaked a hand out of the wonderfully hot water to retrieve the mai tai she'd ordered. She was very tired, and everything still hurt, but she was already making plans. The Arena Club had not worked out as she'd hoped, but there were other options. And Leviathan was not the only player on the world stage that might wish to employ a skilled assassin.

Plus, a rematch with the SSR was definitely in order. There were now several people to whom she owed a good solid punch in the throat.

But first ... perhaps another mai tai. And then a trip to the sauna.


	41. Ana gets a puppy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This was for a general request for anything Edwin/Ana or Ana-centric. [Originally posted on Tumblr.](http://sholiofic.tumblr.com/post/150485276743/as-a-prompt-i-would-be-thrilled-if-you-could)

All her life, Ana had loved dogs, every shape and size of dog. She thought little dogs were delightful and big dogs were wonderful, each in their own way. One of her delights on the first-thing-in-the-morning daily walks that she practiced as a habit was stopping to talk to the dog walkers and pet their dogs.

She had latched onto Bernese mountain dogs mainly as a way of teasing Edwin. He was so serious, so much of the time; she liked to make him laugh. And he had agreed that they might have a dog someday (though possibly not an enormous one), some future day when they were no longer moving around quite so much. Someday, when they had a house of their own.

It wasn't the only thing they deferred for a hypothetical day when they wouldn't be quite so frequently uprooted. Their lives were pleasant and comfortable, full of unexpected delights, and Ana was happy; she never had any doubt of that. But all their sweetest, best hopes were always put aside for someday. 

And then came the day when they both realized that, very often, somedays never come.

***

It was a chaotic time for everyone after Ana came home from the hospital. Chief Thompson was in the hospital himself now, near death, and Miss Carter was constantly coming and going, busy with an investigation that she would speak of only in generalities. Security on the mansion was heightened. Mr. Stark was in and out, causing intermittent explosions in the lab.

Into the middle of all of this, Edwin, darling impractical man that he was, brought home a floppy-eared puppy with oversized paws and a red bow around her neck.

Ana went into raptures of delight at first, only coming to her senses after the tired, overstimulated puppy had fallen asleep in her lap. It was not a good time to have a puppy underfoot. It would require a good deal of time to train her, not to mention constant attention to be sure she didn't run outside with the people continually coming and going. Ana was still convalescing and was not at all sure she had the energy to keep up with an active puppy. And the puppy might harass Mr. Stark's expensive menagerie ... not to mention, they were likely to have to move again soon. Was it really a good time to have a dog?

"My dear," Edwin said gently, "when else?"

Ana took a breath, and thought of an endless parade of somedays, always deferred until tomorrow. It wouldn't be easy, having a dog now. But when would it ever? It was so easy to always wait for the perfect someday, and always brush off the imperfect now.

"I thought ..." she began, breathlessly. "I thought we might name her Dora?"

It was one of the names they'd discussed for their possible future children. She wasn't sure how he'd take it. But she had always loved the name. It was not that she wanted to replace a never-to-be-born daughter with a puppy. It was only that it was a very nice name, and Ana would like very much to have a Dora in her life.

Edwin leaned down and kissed her lips gently. In her lap, the puppy stirred and yawned.

"I can think of none better," he said.


	42. Sick Daniel gets taken care of

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For the prompt: _a sick and feverish Daniel refusing to admit it until it's knocked him completely over._ [Originally posted on Tumblr.](http://sholiofic.tumblr.com/post/150529682718/oh-my-sweet-cheesecake-your-hc-fics-give-me-life)

It started with exhaustion and a scratchy throat. But, damn it, he wasn't going to be sick; he didn't have _time_ to be sick. The West Coast SSR was down to half its normal manpower, due to the ongoing corruption investigation, and his office hadn't exactly been overstaffed to begin with. 

Adding to his determination not to come down with the virus-of-the-season was Daniel's unpleasant discovery the previous winter that his Midnight Oil exposure had left him more than usually susceptible to lung ailments. As soon as the weather started getting cold and damp in the New York autumn, a hacking cough had settled into his chest, accompanied by recurring bouts of fatigue. It had actually been one of the factors in his decision to move west. His lungs felt much better in the dry California climate.

Violet had worried about him. "I wouldn't know without a chest X-ray, but there's probably scarring from the inflammation," she had told him. "You're going to be more susceptible than most people to bronchitis and pneumonia."

He'd shrugged off her warning with a smile, because he already had enough trouble with people thinking he was less capable than he really was; he didn't need to add "gets sick at the drop of a hat" to the list of reasons for his new employees to underestimate him. And he did, in general, have a fairly robust immune system. Doctors had told him that he'd bounced back from the loss of his leg faster than a lot of people did. As a kid, he'd rarely been sick.

So, at the first tickle in his throat, he swallowed a handful of aspirin and chased it down with a mug of lemon tea heavily laced with brandy (his dad's time-honored home remedy for viruses of all sorts) and proceeded to power through on sheer denial. It helped that Peggy was up the coast, chasing down a lead on Underwood. She was the one person who might have noticed something amiss. Not that anything _was_ amiss. He felt perfectly fine, or at least he planned to. Viruses could sense weakness.

"Are you coughing over there?" Jack demanded from the desk he'd commandeered in a corner of Daniel's office, claiming he could think better when he wasn't in the middle of the bullpen. 

"Allergies," Daniel retorted, stifling another cough. It _could_ be allergies. This town didn't really have a season when nothing was blooming.

Jack's suspicious look said he wasn't buying it. "You know, I'm recovering from major chest surgery. If I catch your pneumonia, it could kill me."

"I don't have pneumonia, but if you're that worried about my germs, you could always go down and do paperwork in the records room. There's a desk down there nobody uses."

Fixing him with a distrusting glare, Jack gathered up his files and sloped out of the room, leaving Daniel's office feeling much less cramped.

Heck, if he'd known it was that easy to get rid of Jack, he would have tried coughing on him sooner.

Although recovered enough for light duty, Jack was still convalescing and consequently still hanging around L.A. At least that was the alleged reason -- that, and chasing down leads on the case that had almost killed him. Daniel had come to suspect that the convalescence was mostly an excuse, but didn't have the heart to call him on it. He understood loneliness all too well. However, that didn't mean he wanted Jack camped out in his _office._

(Even if it could also be fun, some of the time. They'd developed a habit of tossing a baseball back and forth between the two desks, and making bets on who'd get a report typed first.)

But he could definitely get more work done without either Jack or Peggy to distract him. The main distraction was his growing suspicion that he hadn't managed to dodge this thing after all. As the day wore on, a headache began jackhammering at his temples, and he found his attention wandering, drifting away from his paperwork to watch the sunshine crawl down the wall. By midday he was dizzy and aching all over, and every time he coughed, it felt like something sharp was jabbing him under the ribs.

In the afternoon, he was due to run the new SSR recruits through some training exercises. He thought about making excuses, blowing it off, going home to crash ... but he _couldn't_ ; they needed to get their new people up to speed as quickly as possible. Peggy wasn't due back until evening or he would have turned it over to her. As it was, he took some more aspirin and steeled himself for an unpleasant afternoon.

It wasn't actually as bad as he'd feared. He had to scrape up all his willpower to muster the energy to keep going, but he had plenty of experience at doing that, and it kept him too busy to pay attention to how lousy he felt. For the most part, he stayed off the obstacle course himself, but he did show them some grappling holds and throws, all of it under the merciless L.A. sun.

He'd driven out with one of the kids, so at least he didn't have to drive himself back -- which was good, because by the time he got back in the car, he was wobbly and fighting off successive waves of dizziness. However, being dependent on someone else to drive him meant he couldn't go straight home and fall into bed; he had to take a detour by the office first. He just wished his head would stop hurting. It felt like it was about to split down the middle.

"You look pale, Chief," the young agent beside him said anxiously.

"Too much sun," Daniel muttered, rubbing his temple and hoping he could manage to make it all the way back to the Auerbach Agency without having to ask his eager-beaver young driver to pull over so he could throw up in the gutter.

At the agency, he let the junior agent go in first, while making a show of rummaging around in the backseat for his briefcase, only to remember he hadn't even had it with him. He'd spent the afternoon fighting hard to put on a normal front, and boy was it catching up with him now.

He wobbled into the agency, dead set on picking up some files from his office and staying home the next couple of days -- only to be confronted with Rose, who was just putting things away at her desk in preparation for heading home. She turned around and he realized as he saw her face change that he'd made a tactical error: Peggy wasn't the only person who was going to notice if something was wrong with him.

"Chief Sousa, you look terrible!"

"Nothing a good sleep won't cure." He tried to maneuver around her, and, in his current unsteady state, almost collided with Jack coming out of the secret filing-cabinet passageway. Jack paused in the act of flipping his hat rakishly onto his head.

"You look like crap, Sousa."

"Will people stop saying that," Daniel snapped. He did a quick step to the side, veering around Jack, and _that_ turned out to be the biggest mistake of all, as his equilibrium went completely haywire.

He would insist afterwards that he did _not_ pass out ... but things definitely got hazy, and the next time he was sure of anything, he was lying on his back, staring up at the vaguely familiar Auerbach Agency ceiling. He felt around with one hand, enough to ascertain that he was lying on the couch in the lobby -- the sole comfortable piece of furniture that the fake talent agency possessed. It was tucked around the corner from the main lobby, and Rose normally kept a heap of coats and books on it to discourage would-be performers from sitting there. It was generally reserved for people she liked.

Rose's quick heels came tapping on the floor, and a cold, damp towel, folded into a compress, descended on his forehead. Daniel mumbled a token protest -- but only a token one, because it felt good, at least as much as anything felt good right now. His head was splitting, and he couldn't remember the last time he'd been this exhausted, this weak. He wasn't even sure if he could sit up if he wanted to.

"Make him drink water," Jack said from farther away -- much farther away, Daniel discovered when he tried to raise his head. Through a wave of dizziness, he found Jack lounging against the wall as far away as he could get, presumably keeping his distance from Daniel's germs. However, he had a vague recollection that it hadn't been just Rose's hands helping him to the couch.

"I don't think it's a good idea to give anything to an unconscious person," Rose said anxiously.

"'m awake," Daniel managed, which set off an agonizing coughing fit that felt like it was ripping him apart inside.

"He was out on the training range all day," Jack said. "In the sun. While obviously suffering from the plague. Sousa, you _idiot._ Peggy is going to kill all of us."

Daniel was too busy trying not to cough to manage to point out that the more likely outcome was that she was going to kill _him._ Then Rose came back with a glass of water and put an arm under his head. Daniel tried to fend her off and managed to half sit up on his own, enough to drink in small sips. The world was swimming around him.

The cool water soothed his dry, itchy throat. Jack was probably right, he thought; he was dehydrated. He hadn't eaten anything all day -- just hadn't felt like it -- and the last thing he'd had to drink was ... coffee? This morning?

Yeah. Peggy was gonna kill him. He probably deserved it.

"I have some Vicks tablets in my desk," Rose said. "I'll get them. Lie down, Chief Sousa. I've locked the agency door, so you shouldn't have to worry about unwanted visitors."

Feeling too lousy to protest, Daniel sank back down on the couch pillows. He twisted his aching head to the side and squinted painfully at Jack. "How was it down in records?"

"Cozy and private," Jack said. "And about a hundred degrees, since the AC apparently doesn't go that far down into the labyrinth. I made friends with one of the mice that lives down there. Have I mentioned how much I'm looking forward to getting back to New York?"

He kept saying things along those lines, yet he was still here.

"Look on the bright side." Daniel stifled another cough. "If I'm out for a couple of days with this thing, you'll have my entire office to yourself."

"Your germ-infested office. Thanks a bunch." However, Jack looked noticeably more cheerful.

 

***

 

Daniel drifted in and out, sipped water when people gave it to him, and woke an indeterminate time later, to a cool hand pushing back the damp hair from his hot forehead, and a pair of soft lips brushing across his cheek. Stirring, he found that a blanket had been thrown across his legs.

"I'm probably contagious," he protested hoarsely.

"So I've been told," Peggy said. Daniel cracked his eyes open. The lights were dim, and Peggy, still in her jacket and work attire, was sitting on the edge of the couch. "By Jack. At length. Complete with complaints about how you were exposing the entire office to your germs. I pointed out that he could leave anytime he wanted. He's gone home now, as has Rose."

"They stayed," Daniel murmured. And he also had vague memories of several other agents stopping by, while he'd drifted, napping the evening away. The blanket over his legs, he now realized, was actually a knitted afghan, supplied by Ana, that Jack had taken to keeping in Daniel's office early in his convalescence, when he got cold easily.

"People worry about you," Peggy said quietly. She smoothed his hair back some more, running her cool fingers across his scalp. He relaxed into it.

"Missed you," he murmured, closing his eyes.

"I swear I can't leave you alone for as much as a day, can I?"

"Guess you just have to stick around."

Peggy laughed quietly, and she leaned over -- with his eyes closed, he was aware of it in the stronger scent of her perfume, and then the touch of lips against the skin at the corner of his eye. "I shall, as best I can. But it's good to know you have people to take care of you when I can't be nearby."

He still felt like seven shades of hell -- his head hurt, his throat felt like needles were being driven into it, and there was a tight band around his chest, making it hard to get a full breath. And yet in some ways, especially with Peggy's comforting warmth resting against him, he'd never felt better.

\--

[Bonus: Vicks cold tablets from 1948. ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenacetin#/media/File:Vicks_Double-Buffered_Cold_Tablets.jpg)


	43. Violet gets a happy ending

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For the prompt: _Can you write a happy ending for Violet?? <3_ [Originally posted on Tumblr.](http://sholiofic.tumblr.com/post/150713326148/can-you-write-a-happy-ending-for-violet-3)

Violet's mother had a favorite saying: _Life is what happens when you're making other plans._ Violet never really understood it when she was a girl, but yes, that was what happened, wasn't it? You imagined the path of your life laid out for you like a shining golden road (marriage, husband, kids, a little house in the suburbs with a tree in the yard), and then it turned out to be a complicated and twisting maze instead. You never imagined all the things life would throw at you, and some were beautiful and some were terrible, but mostly it all turned out to be okay.

She spent the first few weeks after breaking up with Daniel being angry and heartbroken by turns. She was desperately anxious about running into him somewhere -- for all its glitz and celebrity charm, L.A. could feel like a small town in some ways, and Violet had already noticed how easy it was to run into people you knew while running errands in town. She did think once that she might have seen Daniel and Peggy a long way off, from the back -- but maybe it had been a different wounded veteran and his girlfriend.

That was when she decided that she had to get out of town. Everything reminded her of Daniel; she couldn't pass by a restaurant where they'd had a date, or wear her favorite dresses, without thinking about him and all the things they were going to do with their lives.

So she turned in notice at the hospital, took her savings, and left.

Unlike a lot of people she knew, Violet had never left the U.S. during the war; in fact, she'd never left California. She'd attended nursing school during the war on the U.S. government's dime -- there was an urgent need for trained nurses, and it seemed like a promising way to help out -- and then had worked in hospitals serving injured soldiers returning from the Pacific theater.

Now that the war was over, maybe it was time to see some other places.

***

She ended up joining the Red Cross and going to the Philippines. Most of the places shattered by the war were in urgent need of nurses. It was a different way to see the world than what she'd imagined, and some of the things she saw were terrible, but she found that she thrived on the pressure, and when she left to work at a hospital in Australia, she missed it. The conflict in Korea was just starting to heat up, and when a call went out for trained trauma nurses, Violet answered.

And that was how she met Bill, an Army doctor a few years older than she was. She'd dated a few men in the years since Daniel, but Bill was the first of them to sweep her off her feet, and they were married weeks after returning to the States. They bought a house in Bill's hometown, Cincinnati. Violet joined the garden club and investigated the surfing opportunities on Lake Michigan.

And although she'd looked forward to settling back into civilian life and starting her long-deferred family, slowly she began to feel the same restlessness she'd felt in Australia. Three years stateside brought no pregnancy, which her nurse's background told her was statistically unlikely unless one or both of them was infertile. Violet felt as if she should regret that, but instead she found herself hesitantly relieved. She would have loved to raise Bill's children, but ... could she really give up her nursing career and settle into a life as a wife and mother? Once, she'd yearned for that life; now, after years of traveling on her own, she was no longer sure. 

One evening Bill cautiously suggested that he'd been thinking about volunteering with _Médecins Sans Frontières,_ and Violet felt something inside her, dormant since Korea, come alive again.

They put the house on the market the very next day.


	44. Amanda Carter says goodbye to Peggy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: _Amanda Carter says goodbye to her remaining child...._ [Originally posted on Tumblr.](http://sholiofic.tumblr.com/post/150716150708/prompt-amanda-carter-says-goodbye-to-her)

"But you'll still be able to come home some weekends, won't you?" her mother asked anxiously.

"I don't know, Mum. I think the FANY will keep me very busy."

In her months of working as a codebreaker, Peggy had grown used to (though never comfortable with) lying to her parents about her work. They had believed she was working in a typing pool. But it really hadn't been too terribly removed from the truth. Her days had been spent in an office, doing mostly rather dull desk work. She loved knowing that she was actively helping the war effort, and there were moments of thrill as a particularly dense cipher yielded its secrets, but for the most part it was rote work that made her back ache and her eyes tired.

This, though ... this was a step beyond.

When she had given her answer to the SOE, she'd been instructed to join the FANY, the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, as her cover in the civilian world. This would give her a plausible reason for her war work and an excuse for long absences. All female SOE agents did this, she was told.

It still made her heart flutter, in both excitement and terror. Women agents! Going to war!

But it also meant not just obfuscating the truth, but actively lying to her parents. In a way she supposed it was a mercy that they didn't know what she was really doing. They believed she would be driving ambulances and packing parachutes, still in danger from bombing raids, but no more than everyone. They had no idea that she would be the one wearing the parachute herself.

Amanda let out a sigh, and visibly composed herself. Peggy tried not to notice how much older her mother looked than she had just a few weeks earlier. "I'm proud of you, love," she said quietly. "It's only ... a mother worries, you know."

"I know," was Peggy's soft response, as she let her mother fold her into an embrace. She couldn't quite bring herself to voice the lie that there was nothing to fear. 

It only surprised her that she felt no fear herself, nothing but a deep sense of rightness, relief and pride.


	45. Daniel builds a crib

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: _Peggy and Co. vs IKEA AU_. [Originally posted on Tumblr.](http://sholiofic.tumblr.com/post/151095483853/peggy-and-co-vs-ikea-au)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, first of all, this is another one I left off the masterlist. I guess it's a good thing I write all of these in one mega-document.
> 
> Second, it's not QUITE the prompt, but it's related. Rather than going AU, I thought of an interesting non-AU take on this prompt that's more or less along the lines of what I expect the prompt was probably going for (putting together flatpack furniture, that kind of thing?) except in a 1940s/1950s version.

"Daniel," Peggy said from the doorway of the garage, "come to bed."

"Few more minutes," Daniel muttered, down on the concrete floor with his bad leg stretched out in front of him and a lathe-turned wooden crib bar across his lap, carefully carving down the end to fit a space drilled with a drill bit that turned out to be 1/4" too small.

A moment later, he heard her footsteps, quick and light even carrying the weight of eight months' pregnancy. Her hand drifted across his hair and she bent to kiss his forehead. "Just remember you have to work in the morning. This is the boss speaking."

"Duly noted, boss." He tipped his head up to receive her kiss.

She had never -- and he was infinitely grateful -- told him that he wasn't good at this, or that he didn't have to do this. It mattered to him, building the crib for his firstborn son or daughter from scratch. He'd never done woodworking at all, so he'd had to start from square one. Peggy hadn't minded Daniel turning the garage of their new suburban home into a wood shop. He bought what he could afford, and made friends with the neighbors and the lab guys at the fledgling SHIELD to gain access to what he couldn't. It sometimes felt like one step forward and ten steps back, but he was _going_ to build this crib and it was going to be a nice one, not a hacked-together, lopsided piece of junk, but something _nice_ , an heirloom worthy of his firstborn, something his future baby would be proud to pass on to his future grandchildren.

The problem was, Peggy's official due date was less than a month away, and he understood that babies could come early. At the rate he was going, the kid would be walking before he built it a place to sleep.

... which was why he was still up at three a.m., carefully shaving off tiny scraps of wood, trying to make it look _good_ \-- professional -- not something that was going to make his future son or daughter laugh about the crib that fell apart when he or she was three months old.

When he nearly gouged his finger with the chisel, he decided that it was time to go to bed. He had to be up in three and a half hours anyway.

***

Daniel got through the day at SHIELD mostly by working out woodcraft problems in his head. He was fairly sure he'd finally figured out the aspect of the corner-joining technique from the woodworking book that had been eluding him. As soon as he got home, he could start putting the corners together -- for the third time, after having to take it apart twice and sand down the clumped glue to try again.

"I thought pregnant women were supposed to be the ones who couldn't keep two thoughts in their heads, not their husbands."

"Okay, first of all, Jack, please go jump out the window. Second, I'm telling Peggy you said that. Hope you can run fast."

"I can outrun a pregnant woman, Sousa."

"You know she won't be pregnant forever, right?"

"...."

***

He drove home with visions of mitered corners occupying his mind. Peggy, who had reluctantly agreed to stay home from SHIELD in month seven, was buried in a pile of case files in the baby's room (currently serving as a home office) and had forgotten to start dinner. She volunteered to do a takeout run, while Daniel gratefully vanished into the garage.

He'd only been there for a few minutes when there was a polite tap on the door.

Peggy _never_ knocked. "C'mon in," he called, bent over the book of diagrams. If he just cut _that_ bit, and turned it that way ...

"Agent Sousa." Jarvis came in with his hands clasped behind his back, stepping carefully between the neatly planed bits of crib. 

"Jarvis?" The incongruity of having Jarvis, in his impeccably tailored suit, trying not to touch anything covered in sawdust almost sent Daniel into a laughing fit. Years of diplomacy as the head of the L.A. SSR office managed to kick in before it was too late.

"I came to see Ag -- Director Carter. She appears to be absent."

"Yeah, she's out getting food." 

"Ah." Jarvis cast a curious glance over the scattered parts of the project. "Dare I ask ..."

Daniel struggled to his feet with a hand on the workbench. "It's a crib. For the baby. Want me to show you?"

He expected Jarvis to be bored within five minutes, since he and Ana had no children, but in fact Jarvis turned out to have useful insights into the precise techniques of getting the pieces to join up ("No, Agent Sousa, one would add the glue _before_ inserting the dowel --") and the finer details of using the tools he hadn't quite figured out yet.

"Never figured you for the handyman type, I have to say," Daniel admitted.

"I am not, but one can't spend this much time assisting Mr. Stark without picking up a few things."

It wasn't the only night Jarvis showed up -- he claimed that Daniel's garage was a pleasant escape from Mr. Stark's current attempts to expand the menagerie -- and, thanks in part to his pointers, the crib was finished three days before Peggy went into labor.

Daniel could never quite prove whether Peggy had or hadn’t called Jarvis to provide assistance ... but he could never get either of them to admit it, either.

At least, he reasoned, it could've been worse. She could have called Howard Stark.


	46. OT3 holiday negotiations

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is a double fill for two prompts: _Peggy/Daniel/Jack and potentially awkward conversations regarding the practical future of their relationship_ on Tumblr, and the prompt _WHOSE FAMILY gets [culturally significant family holiday] when?_ from a multifandom commentfic fest on DW, for any poly grouping. Originally posted [on Tumblr](http://sholiofic.tumblr.com/post/151508064583/peggydanieljack-and-potentially-awkward) and [on DW](http://thatyourefuse.dreamwidth.org/677875.html?thread=3801075#cmt3801075).

In the beginning, family holidays -- and the issue of meeting the others' families, generally -- wasn't something Peggy had thought about. Nor had either of the others, she suspected, any more than they'd thought about the rest of the logistical issues arising from this complicated thing growing between them. It had simply happened. If they _had_ stopped to think it through, they would probably never have fallen into it in the first place. And besides, work consumed enough of their lives to leave only slices and slivers for each other. They didn't have _time_ to worry about it.

Still, though Peggy had never specifically told anyone that she could recall, the entire SSR seemed to know that she was dating Daniel. At some point she'd also let something slip in a letter home, so now her parents' letters were increasingly insistent about meeting her beau. Somehow _Jack's_ involvement had managed to stay a secret, at least so far; her relationship with Daniel, clandestine in an open-secret kind of way, seemed to serve as a sort of protective coloration over Jack's true relationship with both of them. Some people suspected, and a few people outright knew (Howard and the Jarvises, primarily), but their families definitely did _not_ know, and Peggy doubted they'd take it well.

On their first Christmas, Daniel flew home to spent it with his dad -- "Can't leave the old man alone on Christmas," he'd said, slightly abashed. His mother had died when he was three, and there were no brothers or sisters, so he and his father had always been particularly close. 

Peggy hadn't been home for a family Christmas since 1940, and had no desire to spend the better part of two days traveling to do it now. Jack, for his part, rarely mentioned his family at all. The two of them had a quiet Christmas together under the clear, pale-blue winter skies of California -- though without Daniel, the house felt too large and empty. They ended up going in to the office on Christmas afternoon (Daniel would later give her a flat look and a "Peggy, _really?"_ about that), and Jack flew out to New York on Boxing Day morning -- he'd been shuttling back and forth between New York and L.A. for the last few months. At least he'd get to see Daniel. Peggy tried not to feel too alone until Daniel came back a few days later. It was hard, this never-ending dance; they were rarely all in the same city at once.

By Christmas 1948, they were all three living in D.C., which made things vastly easier in certain ways and much harder in others. In L.A., Peggy had had the plausible deniability of living at the Stark residence, while spending most of her time at Daniel's place, and Daniel's house had also been where Jack stayed when he was in L.A. -- just one Chief of the SSR offering hospitality to another. Daniel's house was the fulcrum around which they pivoted.

But in D.C., they were forced to decide whether to maintain three separate residences -- even though they only needed one -- or give up on respectability and only have one. Daniel and Jack could have roomed together without raising eyebrows, but Peggy couldn't join them without shedding scandal in her wake.

It would have simplified things considerably if she had been willing to marry one or the other of them. Her parents were already asking if Daniel had popped the question. "For God's sake, Carter," Jack had said, with a sort of weary anger, "just do it, already."

"I can't marry him and leave you out. Neither will I marry you and leave _him_ out. Don't even ask."

And there was no future she could imagine that would involve marrying one without the other. It wasn't going to happen. Yet she couldn't quite bring herself to take that final step, the irrevocable trashing of her reputation in the eyes of her parents and colleagues and the world, and move in with two men (or one man, or any men) to whom she was not married. She hadn't realized how much the idea would bother her -- not _doing_ it (that bothered her not at all), but being known as a woman who did it. She'd struggled so hard to get where she was.

In the end, Jack bought the communal house this time -- "I can afford it, and Daniel's the one who had the L.A. place, so it's my turn, right?" Daniel roomed with him ("It's a big house, no point in Sousa shelling out for an apartment when he can just sleep in my spare bedroom and kick in on the bills") and Peggy found herself a flat just a few blocks away. If she was over at Jack and Daniel's every evening, well, they worked together and were now hip-deep in the work of starting SHIELD, so it only made sense, didn't it? And if her house held only the bare trappings of a life -- enough clothes and makeup to indicate that someone lived there, even if the bed was never unmade and the bathroom never needed to be cleaned -- well, then, only her landlord knew.

And D.C. was much closer to Brooklyn than L.A., so Daniel was able to get up and see his dad a few times a year, including Christmas, of course. 

"You guys should come up with me this year. Meet the old man. He's been asking when he can meet Peggy."

"The girlfriend's one thing, but no need to drag along the bachelor friend too," Jack said, obviously in a dark mood. 

Daniel kicked him with a bare foot -- they were all sprawled on the bed in Jack's place, an enormous bed composed of two queen-sized beds jammed together. One of the main things they'd bought the house for was the enormous master bedroom. "Stop it. It's not Peggy and me plus you as an afterthought."

"What are you going to tell him?" Peggy asked, lying on Daniel's other side and sleepily playing with the dark curls on his chest.

There was an unexpected silence before Daniel said, "I was thinking about the truth, actually."

Jack hit him with a pillow. Daniel, not expecting it, took it full in the face.

"You're a terrible spy, Sousa."

"This isn't spycraft, this is our _lives,"_ Daniel argued back as he fought his way out from under the pillow. Sinking his fingers into it, he pulled it out of Jack's grasp. Peggy rolled over and sat up, on the edge of the bed, to stay out of the way of any further roughhousing that might ensue.

"And because it's our lives -- Daniel, are you sure?" she asked quietly. "There wouldn't be any going back."

"I know that." Daniel propped himself up on his elbows and looked between them. "Listen, I know I'm in a different situation from you guys. Neither of you is close to your family in the same way I am. I get that. And maybe it's just that keeping secrets from my dad really bothers me. But I really think he'd come around if he knows it's making me happy."

Peggy tried to understand that. Couldn't. With her family, it was more that she'd simply decided she was going to do what had to be done, no matter what they thought about it.

_And is that what you're doing now, Margaret Carter? Publicly disavowing the men you love to save face?_

It was different, she thought fiercely -- but then, looking at Daniel's face in the soft glow of the lamp beside the bed, she knew it wasn't. She wanted to keep the secret from people who she _knew_ wouldn't understand, her parents among them, because she didn't want to see the most valuable thing in her life, the most precious parts of her heart, laid bare to their disapproval and mockery. But Daniel was willing to hand their secret like a priceless jewel to the person who had raised him, whose approval or disapproval meant everything to him. Daniel's trust that his father _would_ understand, _would_ accept them, hurt her in some deep place, because she wasn't sure if she knew, anymore, what it meant to trust like that.

It wasn't a decision made in a moment or even a day, and there was a lot of arguing beforehand, but all three of them took the train to Brooklyn that Christmas Eve. Peggy had never met Daniel's father before, and liked him immediately, a quiet, slight man with a trace of an accent and a limp that Daniel told her was from a factory accident.

The actual nature of their relationship was never discussed -- or, at least, if Daniel and his father talked about it, Peggy wasn't privy to it. But Peggy had the impression, all weekend long, that Jack was included in the festivities just as much as she was, and she began to suspect (though she never asked) that Daniel might have told his father a long time ago, without mentioning it to the rest of them.

Daniel had no brothers or sisters, but he had a lot of cousins and a handful of aunts and uncles, and Peggy found herself in a similar situation to the first year she'd known Angie: embraced to the bosom of a family she hardly knew. Daniel's family were, on the whole, quieter and shyer than Angie's boisterous lot, but no less welcoming.

She did find time on Boxing Day to take the train up to the Bronx to see Angie -- married now, to a stagehand she'd met while working as an understudy in an off-Broadway production, and pregnant. It was startling to see Angie so domestic, bustling around in the kitchen and apologizing for the state of her flat. They still fell easily back into their old rapport, but Peggy left with the sense that their lives were diverging. Angie seemed deliriously happy as she moved on to the life of a housewife and mother, but Peggy was moving into ... what?

She thought about it as she rode the train back downtown, counting the lighted stations like stars in a subterranean sky. Her life was a strange one; it was not at all what she'd envisioned for her future when she was nineteen and living in Hampstead ...

And it was hard and troubling and confusing, and it hurt, and there was so much of her life that no one she knew would ever understand -- and it was so much better than she'd ever dreamed.

When they got back to D.C. in the last days of a gray, clammy 1948, Peggy turned in notice to her landlord at her flat, and moved the last of her things into Jack and Daniel's house.


	47. More of Michael meeting Peggy's friends

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I got a request on Tumblr for [a sequel to the ficlet I wrote about Michael meeting Peggy's friends](http://sholiofic.tumblr.com/post/144799636653/are-you-still-taking-prompts-peggy-discovering-a), so this was written for that. [Originally posted on Tumblr.](http://sholiofic.tumblr.com/post/151830754673/ooh-could-you-do-a-sequel-to-that-prompt-you)

The standoff went on long enough for Peggy's heart to stand still in her chest. Everyone else was frozen, staring. It was Michael who gave in, taking his hand off his gun.

"Jack," Peggy said.

Jack half-sat, half-collapsed into the chair where he'd been sitting beside the cribbage board, but kept the gun out. He set it on the table, fingers curled over the handgrip with his index finger resting lightly alongside the trigger.

"Peggy --" Michael began, at the same moment as Jack said her name, and in a very similar tone. The two of them glared at each other.

"What the _hell_ is going on?" Daniel demanded, and somehow the plaintive note in his voice managed to defuse some of the tension.

"Peggy, that guy standing next to you is the assassin who shot me," Jack said flatly, keeping his hand on the gun.

Her first instinct was to protest, but she'd seen too much, known too much. And she'd also come to understand _far_ too many of the reasons why otherwise good people might do things they found abhorrent.

However, she did not expect the next thing to come out of Michael's mouth, which was: "Peggy, this guy is a Hydra operative. Step away from him."

Peggy's startled laugh nearly drowned out Jack's disbelieving _"What?"_

"No he isn't," she said.

Michael sidled slightly in front of her, placing his body between her and Jack. "Peg, I know he works for your SSR, but that doesn't --"

"That matters to me not at all," she said sharply, crowding him aside in irritation. "We've just been through a round of clearing out corrupt agents -- and Jack is not one of them. I am _very_ sure of it."

"Yeah," Daniel put in. "His worst character flaw lately is that he's unbearably annoying. He's on our side."

Jack's expression was something that Peggy wished she had the leisure to treasure: a perfect blend of surprise, gratitude, and annoyance.

"You don't understand --" Michael began.

"No, you've been given bad intelligence," she told him. "And you still haven't filled me in on who you're working for, or why they allowed us to believe --"

She couldn't finish; the hurt was still too raw. Jack, of course, being Jack, inserted his own comment into the silence. "Allowed you to believe what?"

When Peggy couldn't quite find the words to answer, Daniel was the one who stepped in. She'd told him everything; she couldn't _not._ "He's Peggy's brother. He's supposed to be, er. Dead."

Tension thickened in the air between them, broken only when Jarvis announced somewhat desperately, "Is anyone in the mood for tea?"


	48. Peggysous painting nursery

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: _Peggy is painting/creating a wall/mural for something (Angie?) but then gets called on a mission. When she returns it's to find Daniel's finished it for her. Which meant standing and painting/whatever for hours, which he's now suffering for._ [Originally posted on AO3.](http://sholiofic.tumblr.com/post/152681037843/dunno-if-youre-still-taking-prompts-lovely-but)

There was no reason why the baby's room had to have a mural on the wall, and Peggy herself wasn't sure why she'd gotten so caught up in the idea of making everything perfect. She wasn't even good at painting -- but with stencils, sponges, and tips from a bunch of books, she was slowly converting one wall into a pretty little jungle, full of leaves and carefully stenciled animals.

"You shouldn't spend so much time standing and stretching," Daniel said quietly from the doorway.

"It's not bad for me," she protested. "Or for the baby. The doctor said it's all right to do light exercise as long as it doesn't hurt."

And she wasn't standing _or_ stretching, just sitting quietly at the breakfast table putting her spoon in a bowl of oatmeal, when a sudden cramp doubled her over.

She was only seven and a half months along. She would never forget Daniel's panicked expression as he drove her to the hospital. What followed was three days of intermittent contractions while flat on her back in bed, quietly begging the baby to just hold on for another few weeks. In the end, her premature labor halted on its own. She was sent home with instructions to stay in bed as much as possible. 

Her body's failure angered and frustrated her. As the head of SHIELD, she had supervised pregnant female agents, and (despite the "helpful" advice of her mostly-male advisory staff) she let them judge when they needed to be taken off duty. Some of them were able to work up until their ninth month. That she herself was having to take to her bed like an invalid, when she'd been so active all her life, seemed like the worst kind of betrayal to her.

And it meant the baby's room would remain half-finished. She told herself it didn't matter. It was only a project she'd been working on in her spare time, anyway ...

And of course being forced to stay in bed meant that she was restless, bored, and couldn't sleep half the time anyway. She was trying to read when she realized that it was almost three in the morning and Daniel still wasn't in bed. He often stayed up late working in their home office (and so did she). She got up, wrapped herself in a robe, and padded carefully into the office -- she could use the company, and suspected he could too -- but he wasn't there.

The light was on in the baby's room.

She stood quietly in the doorway and watched Daniel working. It was obvious he'd been there for a long time; she remembered very clearly how much of it had been done when she was rushed off to the hospital, and a great deal more was finished now. It stretched almost to the opposite wall.

At last, Peggy cleared her throat. Daniel jumped and nearly fell down as he turned around, which made her realize that he must have spent most of the night up here. She hadn't even known. She'd been ... well, if she was going to be completely honest, feeling sorry for herself.

"I was sort of hoping to get this done before you noticed," Daniel confessed. He waved a paintbrush at her. "Surprise?"

"You foolish, darling man." She crossed the space between them to kiss him deeply, then drew back and frowned at him. His face was drawn with pain. "How long have you been up here?" She wasn't going to say it, but they both knew he wasn't supposed to stand for long periods of time.

"It's fine," he said, but she knew him well enough to know when he was in pain.

Peggy curled her fingers through his, and took him downstairs to the bathroom.

Under the bathroom lights, she carefully stripped him out of his trousers and unstrapped his prosthetic leg. The skin was reddened and sore-looking, but the deeper damage, she knew, was inside, where shattered bones had never healed correctly.

"Oh love," she sighed, soaking a wet cloth in hot water and running it over the stump of his thigh.

"You know," Daniel said, with a sheepish look, as he clutched at the edges of the tub in silent pain while she ministered to his leg, "I really was looking forward to having you walk in and find out it was all done."

"I know. But you don't have to ruin yourself to get it ready for me." She leaned forward to kiss him lightly. If her body was betraying her now, at least there was a time limit. For Daniel, it was something he had to cope with every day. "We'll finish it together."


	49. De-aged Peggy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: _Jack and Daniel deal with de-aged 5 year old Peggy._ [Originally posted on Tumblr.](http://sholiofic.tumblr.com/post/152753229328/prompt-jack-and-daniel-deal-with-de-aged-5-year)

The door to the lab slammed open and Jack snapped, "She's disappeared again. Sousa, make yourself useful and _help me."_

It wasn't like hovering in the lab was helping get the device recalibrated any faster, and Daniel caught a distinctly relieved expression on Samberly's face as he left. Stark didn't even seem to notice; he was much too busy exploring the inner workings of the gadget that had reduced Peggy from the head of the brand-new SHIELD agency to ... well ... this.

"Did you check all the closets?" Daniel asked, catching up. "And her office? She seems to like it in there."

"I've looked everywhere." Jack ran his hands through his hair, which was already sticking up in a very un-Jack-like sort of frazzle. He wasn't wearing his sport jacket either. It was probably the most visibly disarrayed that Daniel had seen him in the years they'd been working together.

Of course, Peggy had a way of reducing people to that state even when she _wasn't_ downgraded to a hyperactive five-year-old by one of Howard's devices.

And the fledgling SHIELD headquarters was about the worst possible place for a child to run around. Daniel's blood ran cold at the idea of everything Peggy could have found -- there was construction equipment on some levels, entire lockers filled with guns --

"Where did you last see her?"

"Well, we were playing hide and seek --" Jack began, and at Daniel's boggled look, "What? It keeps her busy and out of trouble, and I can have a cup of coffee and actually get some work done before following the sound of giggling to her hiding place."

"I -- you -- never mind. So she ran off to hide and never came back, basically, is what you're saying."

Jack's expression said it all.

"If she's gotten out of the building, so help me ..." Daniel still wasn't confident that the device didn't have worse side effects than just turning her into a child. At least at SHIELD, they could keep an eye on her in case she started having alarming symptoms.

Besides, it was such a huge, frightening world to be a child in. The fact that Peggy acted so self-assured and fearless as a five-year-old made it hard to remember how incredibly young she really was. And she didn't have her adult memories, though Daniel wondered if that would made things better or worse; the idea of Peggy being able to remember the combinations to all the locks and the fact that she used to carry a gun was nightmarish, but without her memories she was helpless. She thought she was five years old and lived in a suburb of London. She'd seemed to believe the adults when they reassured her, lying shamelessly, that she would see her parents soon, but what if she'd gone looking on her own?

"How can she have so much _energy?"_ Jack groaned, yanking open the door to Daniel's office. Like most of the managers' offices, it was still a work in progress; at least there was no longer a sawhorse in the corner and sheet rock everywhere, but the only items of furniture were a desk and chair. However, this meant there was nowhere to hide, and no sign of a five-year-old anywhere.

They worked their way down from the managerial level, calling her name. There were just too many places to hide, Daniel thought. He was about to suggest calling in some agents and turning to a full-scale search when Jack stopped in his tracks and said, "The vents."

"The what?"

"Vents, the air vents. She was very interested in them earlier. I told her in no uncertain terms that she wasn't to go near them."

"In other words you gave her a direct order not to do something. What did you think was going to happen?"

There were only two plausible entry points to the vents near Jack's office. Up on a stepladder near the ceiling, Jack let out an "aha!" noise and clambered down with a sleeping, dark-haired little girl draped limply over his shoulder.

"How'd she even get up there?" Daniel asked, looking up at the vent rather than at the sleeping child, because the sight of his fiancée as a toddler was a form of nightmare fuel he was trying to avoid as much as possible.

"God knows. She climbs like a monkey." Jack adjusted Peggy so that her small arms were draped around his neck and her head nestled against his shoulder. It would actually have been cute, Daniel thought, if it wasn't Peggy.

"Stop looking at me like that, Sousa, I can hear you thinking over there."

"Since she's turned up, I'm going back to the lab."

"What am I supposed to do with her now?" Jack complained.

"There's a couch in Rose's office, right? Put her on that."

Jack slouched off with a half-asleep Peggy trustingly wrapped around his neck, and Daniel went to the elevator. Staring at the scientists might not speed them up, but it helped _him_ feel better.

“And stay with her this time!” he called after Jack, who freed a hand from the sleeping child and raised it just long enough to flip him off.


	50. Ana hugging Jack

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> So I was joking about #givejackahug2k17 on Tumblr and then people started writing it, so of course I had to. [Originally posted here](http://sholiofic.tumblr.com/post/154501935183/lillianmmalter-irisdouglasiana) (with the original reblog chain/comment thread).

"This isn't necessary."

"You have two choices, Jack," Peggy announced, hauling Jack's suitcase out of the back of the gleaming car that undoubtedly belonged to Stark, while Jack tried to look like it wasn't all he could do to stand up straight. At least he had his suitcase back, admittedly with all its contents in disarray and smudged with fingerprint powder. "Either you go to another hotel and we waste Chief Sousa's manpower putting a round-the-clock SSR detail on you, or --"

She turned to look pointedly at the facade of Stark's mansion.

"Right," Jack said, resignedly. "Or I stay at Stark's."

Peggy set off up the walk, carrying the suitcase as if it weighed nothing. The urge to offer to take it from her was almost overwhelming, but he was restrained by a) the appalling mental image of collapsing under the weight of his own suitcase, and b) the memory of Peggy punching him in the face, an experience he wasn't eager to repeat. 

Over her shoulder, Peggy said, "You needn't act as if it's a terrible imposition. The security is top of the line, Howard employs an excellent cook, and there will most likely be someone around at all hours just in the event of ..." She trailed off as if unsure how to proceed.

"In the event of what?" Jack asked, testily. He had to struggle to keep up with her, but was determined not to show it. "In the event I rupture my stitches and collapse facedown in a puddle of blood and bourbon?"

"A possibility which is much less likely," Peggy said, shooing away a curious flamingo which Jack firmly quashed the urge to ask about, "with the Jarvises in residence, as well as myself."

"And probably Sousa and everyone else you know," Jack muttered under his breath. Peggy had a way of attracting people in herds. He had a feeling that, while the chances of sudden death from unforeseen internal bleeding or fresh assassin’s bullets had gone down, the odds of a restful recovery were now in the negative digits.

The door opened before Peggy could reach for the knob, and a red-haired woman who Jack recognized vaguely as Mrs. Jarvis came onto the portico in a swirl of flowered skirts.

"You're here!" she said cheerfully. "I have, or rather Edwin has, made up the guest bedroom in the east wing, Miss Carter -- I thought you would want it close to yours, for security purposes.”

Oh good. Which also meant he’d be treated to the charming sounds of whatever Carter and Sousa got up to in their spare time.

“It is the one with the unsmiling portrait of Mr. Stark,” Mrs. Jarvis continued brightly.

"Oh, _that_ portrait." Peggy gave a faint shudder. "Well, Jack, you can turn it to face the wall if you find it difficult to sleep."

Mrs. Jarvis was smiling at Peggy in a perfectly friendly kind of way, but Jack had no idea what sort of reception to expect from a woman whose husband he'd arrested and threatened with deportation, and who had recently been shot due to a chain of events he'd helped set into motion. He plastered on his most charming smile and held out his hand, his courteous half-bow a little stiffer than usual as the stitches and dressing on his chest tugged agonizingly. "Mrs. Jarvis. It's a pleasure. I appreciate your -- ack."

Rather than taking his hand, she'd simply wrapped her arms around him.

"She hugs," Peggy said.

Jack cautiously patted Mrs. Jarvis's back -- it was like being hugged by a bird; he was afraid he was going to break her -- and gave Peggy a glare over the top of her head, because _a little warning would have been nice._

Mrs. Jarvis pulled away but held onto him by the upper arms, while beaming at him. "Chief Thompson. It is wonderful to meet you in person at last. Any friend of Miss Carter's is welcome in Mr. Stark's house."

"Uh ..." Jack didn't quite want to correct her, and yet ... "Did Peggy actually tell you _anything_ that I've -- uh -- that's happened to us in the last two years?"

She patted his arm. "But I want to hear about your adventures from _you,_ " she declared. "Edwin is setting out light refreshments on the patio. Or perhaps you could have a nap if you'd rather. Convalescence is so tedious, isn't it?"

"Tedious indeed," Jack said, and shot Peggy a quick "help me" look, but no help was forthcoming as she went ahead of them, toting the suitcase into the mansion.

Mrs. Jarvis urged Jack along with a gentle tug on the arm. Inside the foyer, he was greeted by incredibly tantalizing food smells. It might be the first time he'd been hungry since he'd been shot.

Peggy winked at him over her shoulder, and Jack tried to convince himself that he'd rather be in a nice, peaceful hotel room, rather than at ground zero for Hurricane Peggy and the weird little menagerie of friends that she tended to pull in her wake.

He couldn't even make himself believe it.


	51. Daniel's crutch arm gets injured

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: _Peggysous. A look into how they adapt and learn more about each other and compromise and trust when Daniel's crutch arm gets injured and everything becomes more of a challenge to complete._ [Originally posted on Tumblr.](http://sholiofic.tumblr.com/post/154505389133/if-youre-still-taking-prompts-or-will-take-them)

It was one of the worst things Daniel had been able to imagine: losing his left arm, which functioned as a sort of auxiliary right leg. (That, or losing the other leg, too.)

And then the worst happened, and it ... wasn't so bad?

Okay, he didn't _lose_ the arm; he broke it in eleven places and needed surgery to have stabilizing pins put in. He'd taken a nosedive off a fifteen-foot-high catwalk (which he would freely admit to himself, if not to anyone else, that he had no business being on in the first place) onto a concrete floor. He was probably lucky that his left arm was all he broke.

The weird thing was how relatively easy it was to adapt the second time around. Losing his leg had been ... it had ... it had blown his world to bits, was what it had done, blown up the future and the life he'd always imagined for himself. In the end it had also given him everything, but it had taken him a very long time to realize that.

But after he'd learned to roll with losing the leg, learning to deal with losing the use of one arm for a couple of months wasn't actually that bad. There were a lot of little things to adjust to. The one he thought would be the biggest, which actually turned out to be relatively straightforward, was having to switch over to using his crutch with his right hand. Among other things, it meant he had _no_ hands to carry things with -- which not only put him on desk duty, but also made it hard to do something as simple as carry a cup of coffee across a room. But at least in this case it was more or less what he'd expected.

(He got very good at carrying objects pinched between two or three fingers.)

However, he'd never realized how many tasks were, if not impossible with one hand, then vastly easier with two. Tying his shoes, for example. Washing his hair. He had to have Peggy do the knot in his tie, on those occasions when he had to wear one. Had to rely in her, in fact, for a lot of little things, from helping him button his shirts to opening jars to driving a car, which he was vastly annoyed to realize he could no longer do, at least not without learning a whole new set of skills.

On the bright side, he was off dishwashing duty until he had two functional arms again ...

But it wasn't a complete upending of his world, the way losing his leg had been. And yeah, it was only temporary, which probably made things a lot easier. But it still wasn't the same sideways tumble into a whole new world. It was just a pain in the butt.

Because the things he'd had to learn the first time, one agonizing step at a time, still worked the second time around. Sometimes you had to learn new, slower ways to do the things everyone around you could do easily on the first try. Sometimes you had to tell yourself _It'd be great if you could do that, but sorry, you just can't._ Sometimes you had to rely on others to get the job done.

Losing his leg had made him feel like he wasn't _him_ anymore.

Losing his arm ... didn't. 

It was the best feeling in the world when he finally got the cast off, and could take a proper shower and make love to Peggy with all his (remaining) limbs in play. But it wasn't a vast sea change in the way the world worked. It was just another new thing.

It made him feel better about the possibility that something along those lines might happen in the future. In some ways it almost felt like having to deal with everything surrounding the broken arm -- the doctor's visits, the newly acquired skills for coping with one arm rather than two -- had erased and written over the memories from before, which had been so painful he couldn't even let his mind linger on them.

Now they were just ... there. Something to deal with, but not something that threatened to rear up from the back of his mind when he let his guard down.

And Peggy had been there every step of the way, of course.


	52. A:tLA fusion

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> While procrastinating on something else, I got the urge to write an Avatar: The Last Airbender fusion - though it's really set more in the Korra era. And also it's total crack. I know the names don't work for the setting, but frankly it's not like the rest of it makes a whole lot more sense. [Originally posted on Tumblr.](http://sholiofic.tumblr.com/post/154582344063/im-stuck-on-my-fic-for-the-winter-wonderland-ac)

"You know, Peg, if you'd just learn to use more refined techniques, you could be one hell of an earthbender."

Peggy, panting, straightened up and looked with pride at the building that she'd collapsed on the Fire Nation spies' getaway vehicle. " _You_ can't bend anything, Howard, so stop giving me advice. My techniques are perfectly adequate."

"I think what he means, Miss Carter, is that you have a great deal of raw power, but your form ..." Jarvis trailed off, clearly searching for a tactful way to say it.

"Look like something a four-year-old would use," Howard muttered, fiddling with the device that he was using to monitor their opponents' communications.

Peggy gave him a deeply exasperated look, but didn't say anything. In a sense, she knew he was right. It would do no good to point out that her parents had considered all but the most basic bending forms unsuitable for a young lady, especially given Peggy's tendency to break walls. Most of what she knew about earthbending, Michael had taught her in secret or she'd worked out for herself after she left home and started using it a lot.

She knew that Daniel would never believe how envious she was of his graceful manipulation of water. Even after losing his leg, he'd learned how to work around that disability, flowing from form to form so smoothly that it was hard to believe he'd essentially had to invent his own bending style. His ability to bend his element was almost entirely based in control, unlike Peggy's brute-force approach to earthbending or Jack's similarly uncontrolled "throw fireballs and let the pieces fall where they may" variety of firebending.

Honestly, Peggy didn't see why it mattered. She got the job done, even if she had to move large pieces of the landscape to do it.


	53. Happy New Year's

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For New Year's I asked for a prompt and got: _I'd love to read about Jack being tipsy in a good context. Not drinking his troubles away, but enjoying celebrating with friends, and being surprised when Peggy holds her liquor better than him._ [Originally posted on Tumblr.](http://sholiofic.tumblr.com/post/155235282373/happy-new-year-agent-carter-fandom-thank-you-for)

Peggy was ... not _drunk_ exactly, definitely not. But she was very pleasantly tingly, all the way down to the tips of her fingers.

She just wished this chair would quit wobbling. It was very annoying and was making it hard to poke into the backs of high cabinets.

"Are you sure you want to be standing on that?" This from Daniel, sounding like he was choking down laughter, as he watched the whole thing from a comfortable chair.

"I'm in no danger of falling, thank you." Peggy patted around the back of the cabinet. "Oh bollocks, there's none in here either. Daniel, your house is very tragically lacking in alcoholic beverages."

"I had no idea people were going to _drink it all."_

"Jack, you're much taller," Peggy said as she moved the chair along to check above the china cabinet. "You could _help._ "

"I'm very comfortable here." Jack looked cheerfully relaxed, sprawled on the couch with his arms stretched out along the back of it and his eyes bright and sparkling; the main symptom of how much he'd had to drink was that he kept unexpectedly breaking into a grin. His blond hair, immaculately combed back and gelled into place at the start of the evening, had come partly loose and was flopping on his forehead. He was also, for the first time since Peggy had known him, wearing a sweater: a tan cashmere one that looked both expensive and incredibly soft. 

"Can't get up, you mean," Daniel scoffed. "I thought you had more sense than to challenge Peggy to a drinking contest."

Jack laughed. His laugh was bright, cheerful, and quick, and there was a part of Peggy that wondered if this might be a glimpse of who he'd been before the war: happy, sparkling, and young-looking.

"It's a good thing we're not celebrating the new year at Stark's place," Daniel went on, "or you'd have the entire contents of his wine cellar to choose from, and you'd both be dead already from alcohol poisoning."

Peggy hopped down from the chair. She had to catch herself subtly on the wall and hoped no one noticed. "That's it!" she crowed. "We can go to Howard's."

"Good luck separating Jack from the couch."

"I'm here because I want to be," Jack announced, oozing a little deeper into the couch cushions.

"You know," Peggy said, "we didn't drink _everything_ in the house."

Both of them looked at Daniel's drink.

"No," Daniel said sternly, his lips twitching as he covered the mouth of the whiskey glass with his palm. "This one's mine. You'd have some too, if you'd both drink like sensible people."


	54. Peggy birthday

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the prompt _Peggy and Edwin, birthday girl._ [Originally posted here.](http://ruuger.dreamwidth.org/1019961.html?thread=5595449#cmt5595449)

"But what does she like?" Peggy asked for approximately the 111th time.

She hadn't realized that birthday shopping for Ana was going to take the entire afternoon. Mr. Jarvis insisted on stopping at every show window in the entire downtown L.A. shopping district, examining various items and asking, at great length, Peggy's opinions on their suitability for his wife.

"She does rather like the color green," Peggy offered desperately, as Jarvis examined the dark green suede exterior of an entirely unsuitable handbag. Still, after he had rejected several dozen items she would have considered much more suitable, beggars were not inclined to be choosers.

"I must say I am not sure," he said, and Peggy aggressively refrained from rolling her eyes. "I don't believe it matches her favorite walking suit."

Peggy let out a long breath. It was, she reflected, the height of irony that she was being forced to spend the day before her own birthday in this fruitless pursuit, and furthermore that (for reasons which now seemed flimsy in the extreme) she'd taken off the afternoon at the SSR to assist. By coincidence Ana's birthday was just two days along from Peggy's, and she'd told Mr. Jarvis that _of course_ she would help him selected a gift ...

... and here she was.

"I believe," Jarvis said, his shoulders drooping, "that I must inspect the colors of her wardrobe in order to choose a matching accessory."

"Oh dear Lord." Please, someone tell her they hadn't spent the entire afternoon in the California sun for nothing.

"Miss Carter." He reached across to touch her arm. "Please do not be too cross with me. It's ... it's Ana, you know ..."

"I know," she sighed, and consented to allow him to buy her an ice at a stand beneath a row of palm trees just outside the shops where they had been browsing.

Still, as he drove her back to Howard's estate, she nursed a few private grievances. He had three days to Ana's birthday, in which he could bloody well purchase a gift on his own, now that they had visited every purveyor of feminine accessories and fine china in the greater Los Angeles area ...

She followed Jarvis absently into the kitchen, already thinking of her next day's plans, and then bumped into his back when he stopped walking.

"Now what?" Peggy grumbled, looking around him. She frowned, then.

There were a good many people in the house.

She knew all of them.

There was also, upon the table, a cake.

"Miss Carter!" Ana Jarvis cried, and flung herself on Peggy with a cheerful embrace. "Happy birthday!"

"It's tomorrow ..." Peggy managed weakly.

"Which your boss would've arranged for you to have off," Daniel said, coming forward to clasp her arm and give her a kiss on the cheek, "if you'd told anyone about it."

"Of course I didn't, there's no reason why anyone ..." She looked around in disbelieving horror at the assemblage. "How do all of you _know?"_

"We're spies, Marge." This from Jack, who then pointed at Rose with the knife he was holding over the cake as if he was threatening it. "It was her idea."

Rose promptly turned to Howard, who was already reclining on a chair with a drink. "Mr. Stark had the idea in the beginning, I believe."

"I cannot trust any of you," Peggy declared. "What of your birthday?" she asked Ana.

Ana giggled and kissed her cheek just below the spot where Daniel had pecked it. "Oh no. My birthday is in January."

"Mr. Jarvis," Peggy gasped accusingly, extricating herself from his wife. "Mr. Jarvis, you _lied_ to me."

"I may have stretched the truth a trifle," he admitted.

"Lied. The correct word is lied."

"Does anyone," Jack declared, stabbing the cake, "want cake."


	55. Not quite a Hansel & Gretel AU

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> From a request for a ficlet expanding upon a [Tumblr chat about fairy tales.](http://laylainalaska.tumblr.com/post/155969068439/random-thoughtsprompts) This was [originally posted here](http://sholiofic.tumblr.com/post/157725067348/how-about-that-hansel-and-gretel-idea-we-were).

"This forest looks like something out of a fairy tale."

Daniel murmured the words for Peggy's ears only, getting a wry half-smile from her, but of course Jack -- fighting his way through the undergrowth a few feet in front of them, visible mainly by his dancing flashlight beam -- overheard him. "If any singing dwarves show up, you get to ask them for directions to Snow White's house," his voice drifted back.

"I'd rather ask them for directions to the road," Daniel retorted. "You sure we're headed in the right direction, oh keeper of the orienteering merit badge?"

"You want to come up here and take the compass, be my guest." Jack's flashlight beam jerked erratically as he struggled through a thicket. "And that's merit badges in orienteering, camping, _and_ fly-tying, thanks."

"Keep your voices down," Peggy said softly. "Dottie may be nearby."

After that reminder, the only sounds were the crunching of their feet and Daniel's crutch, with occasional curses when someone stumbled into a patch of thorns or accidentally stepped into a mud hole.

These were old woods, dense and tangled, draped in creepers, and pitch dark at night. Daniel rested a hand on a slippery tree trunk as he struggled over a log, and his fingers came away covered with rotted bark and bits of moss. Daylight would probably have stripped the magic from the place, but by night it brought to mind the folk tales his father had told him long ago: stories from the old country, eerie and dark, filled with lost children and wolves and enchanted monsters.

Jack stopped, his blond hair glimmering in starlight. Peggy and Daniel nearly bumped into him. "What is it?" Daniel murmured, and then he saw. The trees opened up ahead. Under the sliver of a thin moon, a small house stood alone in the middle of a clearing. It looked abandoned; the windows gaped darkly, bereft of glass, and the old stone chimney hinted that the place had been built before the turn of the century. Still, in this dense woodland, the clearing should have been completely overgrown. The fact that it was open and nearly clear hinted that someone had been here before them.

"Trap?" Jack whispered. 

"Do you have to ask?" was Peggy's soft reply.

The dark house in the middle of the midnight woods seemed to hold a sinister air. Daniel wished he hadn't been thinking about fairy tales just then. Especially the ones where the children got eaten.

Jack shone his flashlight on the ground in front of them, densely covered with dead leaves. It was very flat, almost suspiciously so to Daniel's eyes. "Seems safe enough."

"Looks can be deceiving," Peggy said.

"You two cover me. I'll just hop over there and have a peek."

As Jack took a step forward, Daniel had a sudden realization of what it was about that too-flat ground that had nagged at him. "Jack --!" he began, reaching out.

Too late. Jack's foot went down and kept going. With a tremendous splash, he vanished from sight into what turned out to be pitch-black water covered with a thin skin of leaves. 

Jack surfaced a moment later with a yelp and another huge splash. Peggy scrambled forward to seize one of his flailing hands and hauled him, dripping, back under the cover of the trees.

"... don't step there," Daniel finished. Jack was bent over with his hands on his knees, trailing long streamers of pond weeds and coughing.

"Thanks for the advice, Sousa," Jack snapped when he was able to. He swiped a handful of dead leaves out of his hair. "Anybody seen my flashlight?"

"I think it's still down there." Peggy pointed at the wavering patch of light, shimmering beneath the leaves for a moment longer before it went out. 

She had her gun out, and Daniel drew his own. "So, now that everyone within a two-mile radius knows we're here ..." he said, pointedly.

Jack brushed pond scum off his shoulders and extracted something from his pocket that looked suspiciously like a frog; he tossed it into the water, where it vanished with a plop. "Hey, I did the hard part and revealed the moat for everyone's benefit. Anyone else want to take a turn at finding a dry path to the witch's house?"

Peggy promptly took the lead. Daniel suspected she'd been waiting for the opportunity. Giving Jack a nudge to his slightly squishy shoulder, Daniel murmured, "Don't you mean Snow White's house?"

"Does that look like a place Snow White would live? I think we're well into Hansel and Gretel territory by now."

"I take it Dottie’s the witch in that scenario."

"And we're the saps who should've left a trail of bread crumbs," Jack muttered. He drew his gun from its slimy holster and followed them around the edge of the pond.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the record, one part of this fic was actually inspired by a dream I had about a similar flat leaf-colored pond masquerading as solid ground.


	56. Daniel gets the serum instead of Steve

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For this prompt: _Peggy/Daniel Captain America AU. Like, Daniel was selected for the experimental program instead of Steve._ [Originally posted here.](http://sholiofic.tumblr.com/post/157726293473/a-will-always-try-to-give-you-prompts)

There was nowhere to knock at a makeshift privacy curtain hung up in a field hospital tent, so Peggy stood for a moment, steeling herself, before she lifted the curtain and let herself into the enclosure. 

The small, private space was lit dimly with an omnidirectional light filtering through the canvas wall of the tent, a ghostly reflection of the sunlight outside. The sickroom stink of blood and sweat hit her, and Peggy steeled her face to impassivity.

The young man in the bed struggled up on his elbows, blinking weakly at her. "Ma'am?" he rasped out, and then, taking in her officer's uniform, struggled to salute.

"At ease, Sergeant Sousa." She sat down at his bedside so as not to loom over him. He followed her with his bleary gaze, still looking baffled. Women wearing the female version of various Allied military uniforms were not terribly uncommon away from the front; there were WAAFs and WACs and other women's auxiliary branches from a number of countries. But here, on the edge of a battlefield, they were vanishingly rare. The clipboard in her hands suggested she was here on official business, and Sousa's weak gaze went to it.

"I've come to make you an offer, Sergeant." She wished Erskine had done this part, or Colonel Phillips, but she knew both were desperately busy with their own tasks. And she had come to understand that she must be grateful for the crumbs thrown to her if she wanted to have field work at all. "We're seeking volunteers for a project that the Americans are working on."

Sousa sank back down onto pillows that were soaked with morphine sweat. "Ma'am, maybe they didn't tell you ..." His hand circled over the blanket draped over his legs, the unnatural depression where the right one should be.

"They told me," she said. "I've read your file. And you are exactly what we are looking for. We need men who have distinguished themselves for great bravery on the battlefield."

Sousa looked away. His eyes, sunk in dark circles in his pale face, sought the tent wall rather than her face. "Don't know what anyone's told you, but I didn't do a thing anybody wouldn't'a done."

"I heard you saved half your platoon, Sergeant, at great cost to yourself," she said quietly. Turning the clipboard so he couldn't see it, she made a quick note.

Sousa smiled faintly. "That's not how it was. Hell -- uh, heck, ma'am, I hardly even remember it. Just smoke and gunfire and confusion. I did what I had to, and I don't regret it, but if you're looking to pin a medal on somebody, or get some joe to make speeches for the folks back home -- I'm sorry. I don't want any part of it."

"That's not what we want at all," she said, and finally, reluctantly, he rolled his head toward her again. His dark eyes, glistening with a fever glaze, settled on her, and she read curiosity in them ... and an intensity, even in his present condition, that made her look down, flipping to a new page on her clipboard. 

This was the one with the consent form. 

"Sergeant Sousa," she said, "let me tell you about Project Rebirth."


	57. Peggy tries to bake a cake

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the prompt: _Would love a fiction where Peggy tries to be a domestic goddess but fails, Anna helps out_. [Originally posted here.](http://sholiofic.tumblr.com/post/157727535903/would-love-a-fiction-where-peggy-tries-to-be-a)

A scorched sugary smell drew Ana into the kitchen of Mr. Stark's Los Angeles residence. Here she found Miss Carter with her head down over a scribbled sheet of notes, amid a wreckage of mixing bowls, scattered spice bottles, utensils, dribbles of batter, and half-empty sacks of flour that covered the table and the countertops.

"What happened here?" she declared, causing Peggy to look up, eyes widening in shock.

"The cake!" Peggy dropped her pencil and sprang from her chair to open the oven. "Oh, bollocks ..." She hunted desperately around, peering into the mess in search of something.

"Are you looking for these?" Ana suggested, holding out a pair of potholders.

"Oh. Yes. Thank you." Peggy extracted a cake pan with its contents blackened and faintly smoking along the cratered top. "Oh, I simply _cannot,"_ she declared, and smacked it down on top of the stove a little harder than necessary. 

There were three other cake pans on the stovetop, each containing a similarly tragic-looking cake, most of them burned except for one which was collapsed into a flattened mess.

Ana drifted closer to take a quick glance at Peggy's notes on the table, which she assumed were a recipe, only to find that they were actually something entirely different.

_\- Midnight meetings @ warehouse. Sting opportunity??  
\- Stolen hydra weapons  
\- leviathan operating locally??? ask daniel_

And so forth. There were also various papers scattered around, which appeared to be maps and blueprints, most of them dusted with flour and splattered with cake batter, pinned down with various cooking utensils.

Peggy snatched a batter-smeared bowl from the table, gave it a critical glance, shrugged, and slammed it down on the countertop. "Mrs. Jarvis, do you happen to see the eggs anywhere? Do we even have any? Oh, of course, the _ambulance_ ...." She swiveled back to scribble something on the notepad.

Ana went to the refrigerator and found the usual stock of eggs sadly depleted. She took out the half-empty carton that was left. "May I offer assistance, if there is anything I can do?"

"I have no idea." Peggy absently took the carton of eggs with a brief nod of thanks in her left hand, while writing busily with her right. "This confounded cake ... it simply will _not_ cooperate --"

Eggs in hand, she reluctantly tore herself away from the notepad to a batter-dotted cookbook open on the counter beside her. "Sift dry ingredients together _first,_ for heaven's sake," she muttered, and set the eggs down on the counter before turning to hunt through the mess until she seized on a sack of flour. "One would think I'd remember by now. Mrs. Jarvis, do you see -- oh ... thank you," as Ana placed a measuring cup in her hand.

"Miss Carter, I would be happy to help," Ana declared, trying not to wring her hands at the devastation that the kitchen had been reduced to. She didn't care on her own behalf, but she could only imagine Edwin's expression when he saw it. He would be very polite about it, but he was always so politely tense when she accidentally put the measuring spoons back in the wrong order. This was going to give him nightmares.

"I don't want to impose," Peggy demurred. "It's only ... have you any practice at baking cakes?"

"I am very good at baking cakes," Ana assured her. "And I greatly enjoy it. If you need a cake, I would be very happy to bake one for you."

"Oh, would you? Please!" It bordered on a cry of desperation as Peggy all but shoved the mixing bowl into Ana's hands and glanced at the clock. "It's Daniel's birthday, and I meant to make a cake -- I'm afraid it hasn't time for cooling now before the frosting is put on, but I've been at it all day, and ..." Her eyes drifted to the page of notes on the table.

"You keep getting distracted," Ana supplied.

"Yes," Peggy said with a look of desperate relief.

"Miss Carter. Please do not despair." Ana patted her arm. "I will bake him a very nice cake. You can tell him you baked it yourself. After all ..." Her amused gaze drifted across the display of cakes on the stove. "You have baked him many cakes already."

"I shall be entirely forthright about the cake," Peggy declared staunchly. "The important thing is that there _is_ a cake. Are you very sure you don't mind?"

"I don't mind at all. Please, go sit and have a nice glass of wine and do whatever SSR thing it is that you are doing." Ana gave her a gentle shove toward the sitting room.

Peggy snatched up the notepad and several batter-stained blueprints, and wandered off toward the comfortable chairs, absently swiping a thumb across a spot of batter and sticking it in her mouth.


	58. Dresden Files AU

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the prompt: _How about a genderswapped Dresden Files AU where Peggy is the wizard and Sousa is the cop? Throw Jack in there as Thomas Raith :)_. 
> 
> This prompt made me grin HUGELY when I got it. Peggy as Harry Dresden. That's too perfect.
> 
> Dresden Files is fairly standard urban fantasy, so I don't know if there's much that needs explaining here for anyone reading this who hasn't read Dresden Files, except for the White Court vampires, which is what Thomas is (and therefore what Jack is). They feed on emotional energy drawn from their victims, and the hungrier they get -- which happens when they haven't fed in awhile, or when they're tired or need to heal -- the less control they have, so it's very easy for a hungry White Court vampire to lose control, drain its victim entirely, and kill them.
> 
> [Originally posted here](https://sholiofic.tumblr.com/post/157934317263/since-ive-done-the-soulgaze-one-how-about-a).

Hellhounds weren't the worst thing Peggy had fought, not by a long shot. But there were just so damnably _many_ of them. And in the Nevernever, she was on their home ground, not her own.

She'd been driven back, panting, until her back was pressed against a cliffside. Thorny trees curled around her, ripping through the spelled leather jacket she wore as if it offered no more resistance than warm butter. As a small plus to her desperate situation, the trees -- heavy with malevolent intent -- were no friendlier to the shadowy beasts who would otherwise have pressed in on her from all sides. The hellhounds had to attack her from the front, and she tore through them two and three at a time, wielding both staff and gun.

But she was tiring. She was out of her stored energy and down to the dregs, bleeding from a dozen minor wounds. And now she could hear the distant sound of hunting horns.

If she couldn't cut a path through the hounds and get to the rendezvous point -- the Way that would get her out of the Nevernever and back to the mortal world -- before the hounds' masters got here ...

Well. No point thinking about complications before they came up, was there? She had more than enough to deal with already.

She'd expended the power in the rings on all her fingers except for the ring Daniel had given her. It was engagement ring and promise all in one, and it was also her hole card, a reservoir of last-ditch stored power that she dared not tap until she had no other choice.

A shadowy beast with teeth that were all too corporeal slashed through the sleeve of her jacket. Pain blazed up her arm. She shot it through the skull with another of her fast-dwindling supply of charmed bullets and backed to the very foot of the cliff. The trees seemed to silently laugh at her as the hellhounds ranged themselves in a semicircle of shadow in front of her, their eyes burning in the twilight. The runes on her staff flared dully as she pointed it at them. They seemed to know she was down to the last of her power, unable to draw on the Nevernever as she could have on Earth; she would have to burn the stuff of her very soul to fight.

Or use Daniel's ring -- but there was enough of Daniel's soul in the making of it that she wouldn't. Couldn't. Not unless there was truly no other choice.

And then --

Then there was something else -- someone else -- in their midst.

He moved too fast for Peggy's eye to follow, but she knew who it was in the instant she saw the gleam of the sword and the glimmer of blond hair in the twilight. She leaped back into the fight, emptying her spelled gun into the nearest of the hellhounds and clubbing them with her staff until she'd fought her way to her unlikely savior and stood back to back with him.

"Jack," she gasped out. From somewhere inside her, she found another reservoir of untapped energy and the runes on the staff flared to life, a surge of fire driving back the hellhounds in front of her. "Are you here to help me or capture me?"

"Do I have to choose just one?" Jack glanced over his shoulder at her. He wasn't even sweating, the bastard, but his eyes had paled to silver, and against her will, her body responded to the hot tug of the power he was tapping into in order to fight.

She'd never really pushed up against the limits of Jack's control over his incubus nature. She didn't really want to do it here; the last thing she needed was to fight an ally as well as her enemies.

"I hope you have a good plan for getting to the border." The hunting horn sounded again, even closer.

"Oh, I do." Jack's voice was incongruously cheerful, given their situation.

An instant later, Peggy found out why, as a cherry-red convertible sports car -- looking about as out of place as it was possible for anything to look in their primitive surroundings -- plowed into the pack of hellhounds from behind. Wheels spinning on grass, throwing out bits of turf, it slewed around in a tight circle and Daniel yelled, "Get in!"

They were still blocked from the car by half a dozen snarling, slashing hellhounds, so Jack unceremoniously picked up Peggy, ignoring her startled "Hey!", and threw her over the hellhound pack into the backseat. When he was drawing on his demon side, he was several times stronger than a human, and he flung her into the car as if she weighed nothing. The leather seat smacked her painfully in the face and she bruised her ribs on her staff. She thrashed her way upright just in time to see Jack slice two hellhounds in half with a single slash of his sword and then launch himself off a branch of the nearest tree to leap over them, landing with a series of stumbling steps on the grass just behind the sports car. He vaulted over the trunk into the backseat, shouting, "Go, go, go!"

Daniel floored it. The car fishtailed on the grass and then roared forward.

Jack dropped into the backseat beside Peggy, splattered with dark gore. He wiped the sword on his gray jeans and sheathed it. He was holding it with his left hand, she noticed. His right was low, unobtrusively at his side, with the fingers curled. He must have burned himself on her skin when he'd thrown her.

White Court vampires of Jack's house, who fed on raw lust, could not bear true love's touch. The bare skin of someone who loved and was loved burned them as fiercely as fire. She couldn't touch Jack without gloves, and it was worst with the hand where she wore the ring Daniel had given her. That ring could burn him even through the protection of cloth or leather.

"Peggy, are you okay?" Daniel asked over his shoulder, not taking his eyes off what passed for a road, really more of a trail. The car bounded wildly over ruts and tore through a thicket.

"I'm fine." She twisted around to look behind them. The hellhound pack was pursuing, and from the look of things, catching up. Behind them, she caught her first glimpse of a dark rider.

"You're covered in blood," Jack remarked, drawing a gun to replace the sword. He held it in his left hand, balanced on the half-closed fist of his right.

"Most of it isn't mine." Sensing Daniel, in the front seat, winding up for some kind of rebuttal, she tried to head him off. "This isn't your car, Daniel, is it?"

"It's Jack's," Daniel said between clenched teeth. His knuckles were white on the steering wheel. "How much farther?"

"Not much --" Peggy broke off as another mounted rider, or perhaps the same one, reared in front of them, looming in the car's headlights. Space and time were malleable as putty here; they could have been caught instantly if their pursuers had wanted to. But it was all part of the game. The quarry had to be given a reasonable chance to escape.

"Left!" Jack snapped.

Daniel veered left, roaring through some sort of ancient cemetery, knocking over headstones left and right. Peggy wondered what the Fae penalty was for desecrating a graveyard. It wasn't like they could hate her any more than they already did, though.

"Where are we going?" she demanded, gripping the seat. If the ride had been rough before, it was a dozen times more so now.

"There's a door I know," Jack said. "It's close. Actually -- right there!"

Peggy sensed the thin spot between worlds and, with what energy she still had to draw upon, ripped it open. The car tore out of the graveyard into --

\-- a very similar-looking graveyard. They slewed sideways and slammed into a headstone as Peggy sealed the rift behind them, one step ahead of their pursuers.

"Can't they just open that?" Daniel asked frantically. He was cranking the key, trying to restart the engine, which had died at their sudden, precipitous stop.

"They can't chase us into the mortal world; it's against the rules. At least, this particular set of rules in this situation." Dealing with the Fae always gave her a headache, though right now her head hurt for various other reasons. She felt around for her gun, which she'd dropped when Jack had thrown her into the backseat, found it on the floor of the car, and holstered it with fingers so tired they ached.

"So what'd you do to piss off the Fae, Peggy?" Jack asked, carefully flexing the fingers on his burned right hand.

"None of your business," she retorted, letting her aching head flop back against the seat. An instant later she opened her eyes, looking up against trees framed against a sky spangled with stars and nearly untouched by light pollution. "Er ... where exactly are we? This isn't New York."

"Pennsylvania, I think," Jack said.

 _"Pennsylvania?"_

"Central Pennsylvania. Amish country."

Daniel twisted around in his seat, flopping an arm over the back. "You do understand I have a job, right? Where I'm supposed to be in --" He checked his watch. "Six hours?"

"We should be able to drive back in that time." Peggy took his hand, lacing their fingers gently together. "Thank you. Both of you," she added, somewhat grudgingly, to Jack.

She was hyper-aware of him next to her in the backseat, despite their mutual, grimy and exhausted condition, which meant that his powers were still exerting a draw on her. "And stop doing that," she told him.

"I can't help it." His eyes were pale silver, almost white. "I just fought off a pack of hellhounds, and I need to eat."

"Well, you aren't eating me, so get control of yourself."

Jack stared at her, eyes whitening and beginning to lose their pupils. The compulsion she felt, the heat of arousal rushing through her, was almost overwhelming. She knew she should look away, but her body was telling her something entirely different.

Daniel cleared his throat. Peggy snapped her gaze away from Jack's to find that Daniel had drawn his service weapon and lowered it at the vampire's skull. From the slight flush on his face, he felt the same compulsion Peggy did, but being less tired, he was doing a better job of fighting it off.

"I really appreciate your help tonight," Daniel said. "Now get yourself together and stop trying to whammy us, or I'm going to kill you."

Jack stared at him, then closed his eyes and took a brief, halting breath. When he opened his eyes again, the irises were darkening back to their usual hazel, and his face was set in grim, cool lines. He got out of the car and stepped away, his back to them, posture tense.

Daniel sighed and slumped against the seat, letting his gun hand drop, His fingers were still locked around Peggy's. "Before you ask," he said, "he was the only person I could think of who might be able to get me into that spirit-thingie place after you."

"The Nevernever."

"Yeah. That." He looked skyward as if asking for strength. "And now we're in Pennsylvania and facing a road trip back to New York in a vampire's car."

Jack turned back, his face composed and his eyes entirely human again, and opened the driver's door. "Which I'm going to be driving. So shove over."

"Glad to oblige," Daniel said sweetly, and got into the back, with Peggy.

Jack coaxed the engine to life and pulled carefully around the headstone. There was an ominous rattle in the transmission. Peggy was impressed the car had survived its adventure in the Nevernever at all, and its exposure to all the magic there. It was a classic model with few electronic parts; a newer version would probably never have made it.

"There'd better not be _anything_ going on back there, I'm telling you," Jack said grimly as he pulled out onto a rural road framed by dark trees. "Because I'm only barely in control of myself right now as it is."

Peggy leaned her head on Daniel's shoulder as he put an arm around her. She was safe ... safe for now, at least. For certain values of safe. "I'll probably sleep all the way back to New York anyway."


	59. OT3 time travel AU

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _Peggy/Jack/Daniel Timeless AU. Because time traveling ot3. Chasing rogue time traveler Dottie through time?_
> 
> I'm not familiar with Timeless canon, so I went with general time travel. Such a brilliant idea though!
> 
> [Originally posted here.](https://sholiofic.tumblr.com/post/158301764898/i-dont-know-if-your-call-for-prompts-is-still)

"Ah, 1948 Los Angeles," Jack said, tipping a fedora over one eye and inspecting himself in the mirror. "The Golden Age of Hollywood. Cagney and Bogey, Hepburn and Vivien Leigh, and let's not forget classic Cold War spy games with buttonhole cameras and shoe phones! Finally Dottie has the sense to turn up in a time period with some style."

"Also McCarthyism, sexism, racism, and don't even think about kissing Daniel on a public street corner." Peggy checked the fit of her dress, adjusting the high waist. She missed trousers. At least the fashions of the 1940s were much less constricting than the full skirts and corsets of the time period they'd just come from.

"Did I hear my name?" Daniel asked, opening the door of their hotel room and slipping inside with a takeout bag.

"Peggy's being a killjoy," Jack said, tipping the fedora the other way.

"Jack is being a ridiculous peacock, and I'm concerned about showing the entire world my knickers if I have to fight in this dress."

"Which knickers would those be?" Daniel asked, sitting down on the nearest of the hotel beds to open the bag he'd brought.

"The red ones," Jack said as he adjusted his tie.

"Oh, those. No worries, Peggy, no one will mind."

"I regret so many of my life choices at this moment," Peggy remarked to no one in particular, trying to tweak a crease out of her nylons.


	60. Jack keeps visiting L.A.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: _Peggy/Jack/Daniel (shippy or gen) - the increasingly ridiculous excuses that Jack comes up with to keep visiting LA_. [Originally posted here.](https://sholiofic.tumblr.com/post/158428498163/peggyjackdaniel-shippy-or-gen-the)

"You _literally_ flew across the country to get a file."

Jack glanced up from the filing cabinet, sarcastic half-smile already in place. "No, Sousa, I flew across the country in order to look through _your_ files for something specific I need for an especially high-profile case. The governor himself is riding my tail on this one. I could have you blow your discretionary budget on couriering most of your files across the country and back -- _or_ I could fly out, find it, and get back so I can close this case before I retire."

"Or," Daniel said, leaning on the end of the row of filing cabinets and draping his arm over the drawer, "you could describe it over the phone and have my guys find it for you."

"And put your office to work for days, lowering your case-closure record even more than it already is? I haven't got the heart. Anyway," Jack added, as Daniel looked like he was scouting for something to throw, "the main thing is that I'll know it when I see it. It's easier to just get it myself than to try to explain."

"Even if it means a two-day round trip."

"A Chief's work is never done, right?" Jack asked, stuffing a file back into the cabinet where it belonged and tugging out another handful.

"So they say." Daniel reached for his crutch, leaning against the wall; he was getting surprisingly adept at moving around without it, holding onto nearby walls and furniture instead. "Well, since you flew all that way, it couldn't hurt to come out and let me and Peggy buy you a drink. Local agent buys the first round -- isn't that what you used to say?"

Jack raised an eyebrow. "And watch you two lovebirds coo over each other all night? Sounds like a great spectator sport."

"As opposed to digging through the dead-file morgue all night, which I know from personal experience is a laugh a minute." Daniel slipped his hand through the crutch loop. "We'll be at the Frolic Room in --" He made a show of checking his watch. "About half an hour. Hurry and you might even catch a ride with Peggy."

"I didn't say yes!" Jack called after him.

Daniel waved cheerfully as he vanished out the door.

Jack stared at the stack of files in his hand, groaned, and slammed them on top of the filing cabinet. The _really_ annoying thing was when he couldn't even lie to himself anymore.

The files would still be there in the morning, and the company was definitely better out in the LA office.


	61. Competitive Jack and Peggy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: _Jack and Peggy get a little competitive over something. And then a lot competitive. And Daniel walks in innocently only to become the innocent victim._ [Originally posted here.](https://sholiofic.tumblr.com/post/159177743208/you-honestly-are-just-a-gift-that-keeps-on-giving)

Daniel could hear the sharp, staccato rattle of gunfire as he approached the door of the SSR firing range. Someone was already there, and at six o'clock on a Saturday morning, he had only two likely guesses about who it might be. One was very welcome company, the other decided less so.

He opened the door just as the shots died away to silence, and found that he was wrong: it wasn't just one of them. It was both.

"Six shots, dead center," Peggy said with profound satisfaction. "And what's this I see? Is that a bullet hole half an inch off from the center in _your_ target?"

"My wound twinged," Jack snapped, making an elaborate show of rubbing at his chest. "At exactly the wrong moment."

"Yes, I had SOE instructors during the war who would use that exact excuse. 'Old war wound, such a pity' ..." she groaned in a creaky imitation of an elderly veteran.

"Right. Rematch," Jack declared, snapping a fresh magazine into his pistol. "And trade weapons."

"You intend to blame your sidearm as well?" Peggy inquired. Her tone was cheerful, though, and she was smiling. She'd always had _far_ too much energy at six in the morning. "Noble of you."

"No, I'm just making sure this is as fair as possible." Jack waggled the .38 at her, grip first.

They could be at this for hours. Daniel took a very careful step backward. Possibly they hadn't seen him yet --

"Daniel!" Peggy exclaimed, and he hastily plastered a welcoming smile on his face, hoping it didn't look too much like a grimace. "You can referee. Please examine our weapons." She held out hers. "Jack seems to think I'm cheating."

"I didn't say _cheating,_ it's just that occasionally there's a slight pull to the right on this particular model --"

"They look fine to me," Daniel said after a cursory glance.

Jack scowled at him and then held out his weapon pointedly in Peggy's direction. 

"Oh, as you wish," she sighed, swapping guns. "I can mop the floor with you just as well with one as the other."

"I was just getting warmed up. Top marksmanship in my unit, you know."

"Yes, you've said. You did get _most_ of your shots in the center, I will hand you that. Most," she repeated. 

"You're goin' down, Carter."

Hours. They would be here for _hours._ Daniel quietly let himself out. This time neither of them noticed him go; the clatter of gunfire started up again.

He'd go get some paperwork filed, then come back and collect Peggy for breakfast. By that point he expected to find, based on previous experience, that either things would've disintegrated into an actual fight and they wouldn't be speaking to each other, or (the more likely option these days) they would have gotten past the initial competition and would be cheerily swapping shooting tips, which meant Jack would probably invite himself along for breakfast whether they wanted him or not.

Life had been so much simpler in the old days.

Or possibly the word he was looking for was dull. Or lonely.

He started whistling to himself quietly as he collected a box from the file room and took it up to his office.


	62. Violet delivering Peggy's baby

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted [on Tumblr](https://sholiofic.tumblr.com/post/163481868058/another-prompt-violet-somehow-ending-up-being-a).

Violet wouldn't normally have been taking a shift in the maternity ward. But the hospital was short-staffed as always, and in the shift-swapping, she'd ended up trading with Martha down in Emergency, and Martha, it turned out, had traded with Liz the delivery nurse, and -- well, it wasn't her usual area of expertise, but nursing was nursing, and one night with newborn babies wouldn't hurt her, right?

Hahaha.

Of course it had turned out that it really, _really_ wasn't her night.

She didn't hold anything against Peggy Sousa-née-Carter, not really. She had lost that skirmish fair and square ... well, in a way it hadn't even been a fight, at least not on Peggy's end. She'd gone through being hurt, and being angry, and then she'd met Bill and things were going very well on that front, so she didn't even feel a whole lot of that anymore.

She would be lying if she said she didn't have a sharp twinge at the sight of a very, _very_ pregnant Peggy panting through contractions with an anxious Daniel hovering in attendance. However ...

... it was the Russian spy and the masked gunmen that she really minded. 

"Oh, Peggy, Peggy," sighed the woman with unconvincingly dyed red hair, who was handcuffed to the radiator. "Not that the cuffs aren't fun, but if you'd only unlock me, I could help --"

"You are staying right there," Peggy snapped, standing on the bed in a hospital gown with her legs spread wide apart as she tried to work loose a ventilation grille in the ceiling. Daniel turned around from guarding the door with a gun in one hand and his eyes went huge. 

"Peggy! What are you doing!"

"I am attempting to get a message out -- ow --" Peggy stopped and clung to the metal bedframe, while a half-dozen women in various stages of labor and a number of nurses holding babies or gripping the hands of their laboring charges stared anxiously. Violet had a newborn baby in each arm, rescued from the nursery, so it wasn't as if she could do anything about it. She wasn't sure whether to be glad that they hadn't yet placed the IV and induced twilight sleep in the currently quite active Mrs. Sousa before the redhead tried to abduct her and gunmen stormed the hospital, or wish that she'd just let nature take its course and all of this would be someone else's problem _far away._

"Oh, oops," the redhead said cheerfully, raising her hand with the cuffs dangling from the wrist, not from the radiator. "I appear to have gotten free. Shall I take a message through the vents for you?"

"No!" Peggy said sharply, clinging to the bedframe and gritting her teeth. "Daniel, please handcuff Dottie again."

"I just wish you'd get down off that bed before you fall off," Daniel complained, swiveling to point his gun at Dottie, who looked unconcerned. Just then there was a flurry of gunfire from the hallway outside and Daniel frantically spun back around and peeked out the door, only to step back and open it with a sigh of relief. The suit-wearing, official-looking types who stormed into the room stopped short at the sight of a room full of women in labor, babies, and stunned nurses. 

_I should have taken the week off,_ Violet thought. _Mother wanted me to visit her. Why didn't I just say yes?_

The blond lead agent swept his gaze across the room, and delivered a narrow-eyed look at the woman no longer cuffed to the radiator (who smiled cheerfully back at him), before he fixated on the woman on the bed. "Peggy, for God's sake ... I suppose you're responsible for the men tied up in the boiler room?"

"That was mostly Daniel," Peggy said demurely. "Would you place Dottie under arrest, please? Perhaps it'll stick this time -- oh --" She sat down hard on the bed. Daniel lunged to her side.

The blond agent, in the process of handcuffing a suspiciously cooperative Dottie, gave her a startled look, and then Daniel. "Is she _actually_ \-- uh --"

"Yes," Peggy said between her teeth, as Daniel clung to her hand. "I am in fact having a baby, and would rather like to get on with it -- _oh_ \--"

The blond agent blanched. Dottie looked happy. "Don't forget to name it after me!" she called as she was hustled out the door. "If it's a boy, you can be a trend-setter!"


	63. Rose in her new posting at the L.A. SSR

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted [on Tumblr](https://sholiofic.tumblr.com/post/165393656148/oo-rose-during-the-war-andor-how-she-got-hired).

Rose has been in L.A. for a week, and so far it's been a thrilling whirlwind. She's living in a hotel, looking for a permanent place (houses are _so much cheaper_ here than in New York City; it's incredible), and taking on an ever-larger share of the job of setting up the new SSR offices. It's just ... there's so _much_ to be done, and so few people to do it. Not to say a bad word against Agent -- er -- Chief Sousa, who she has all the respect in the world for, but he's clearly not a man with a great deal of experience at managing an office. Rose, meanwhile, ran the Bell switchboard office in Farm Hill, Ohio for six years prior to the war, and has been running the not-exactly-fake cover office in New York for a year and a half.

It's not glamorous work; it's everything from interviewing support staff to buying office supplies to hammering nails into drywall. But Rose doesn't mind. Less than a decade ago, she thought she'd spend her entire life in Farm Hill, growing old in the house she grew up, feeding her widowed mother's cats and tending their shared flower and vegetable garden.

"Say, do you mind me asking you for a little help, Rose?"

Chief Sousa blushes slightly as he says it. It's late, and they're the only two people in the stripped-down front office that's going to be their cover business. Rose is hanging pictures, arranging furniture, and making everything look just so, while the Chief goes through dossiers for prospective agents, sitting at what is probably going to be her desk. (Her own desk!) The brand-new Auerbach Agency sign leans against the wall, and Rose can't stop looking at it in satisfaction. It looks crisp and new and delightful.

"Nothing inappropriate," he adds quickly. 

"Of course," she says. Chief Sousa has been nothing but polite and respectful to her since she arrived; even if the two of them have ended up working late together, in a way her mother definitely would not approve of, she doesn't think he'd say anything fresh. (Not that she'd mind, although ... there is also Peggy to be considered.)

"Right." He clears his throat and flips over a file folder, making a note to himself, then lays them aside. "Want to help me hang up a sign?"

"Oh, of course!" She's desperately curious to find out what that bright new sign will look like, hanging outside the agency. And she realizes why he needs her help when they go to liberate one of the painters' stepladders. Chief Sousa can't climb one of these. He looks embarrassed as Rose helps him carry it outside, into the warm L.A. night.

"I probably shouldn't have asked you for this," he apologizes. "We can just get the construction boys to do it in the morning --"

"I don't want to wait," she confesses, and he grins, quick and bright. His doubts return once she's up on the ladder, but Rose climbs quickly before he can order her not to.

"So tell me, Rose," he says, grunting with effort as he hands the sign up to her. "How'd you get into this line of work? I'm just curious."

"Oh, the war, I suppose. I volunteered as a nurse, and fell in love with traveling. That's why I started working for the Bell Company in the first place, you know, back in '21 -- I thought it was glamorous and maybe I'd get a chance to travel." Rose smiles briefly at herself as she carefully lines up the sign with the hooks that are already in place to hang it. "The advertisements promised a great deal more than the job delivered, at least in Farm Hill. It was a fine life, I had no complaints about it, but when the war came ..."

She hesitates, because it seems unkind to say to Chief Sousa -- who lost a leg in the war, like so many other poor boys who came back damaged -- that for her, it was an opportunity, a chance to rediscover something inside herself that she'd nearly forgotten.

"Went well, did it?"

"Oh, goodness no. I was terrible at it. The nursing, I mean. But when the war was over, I thought maybe I'd try my hand in the big city rather than going back to Farm Hill."

Chief Sousa looks up at her with a curiosity he's never shown towards her before, though (unlike some of the men she worked with at the New York SSR) he's always been perfectly polite. "So you just showed up at the SSR and asked for a job?"

"Oh no, no, there was an advertisement. Ah!" She drops the sign into place, and climbs down the ladder to admire her handiwork. " _Trained, discreet switchboard operators needed_ ... do you know, I still remember the exact words of it? I've got to say, it was a little bit of a shock when they asked me at the interview if I knew how to use a gun. I grew up helping my granddaddy shoot crows in the cornfield, so I was a crack shot with a load of birdshot, as I told them. Maybe that's what tipped the scales, or maybe it was my nineteen years with the Bell Company." Remembrance makes her smile.

Chief Sousa looks at her for a moment longer, then shakes his head. "We're lucky to have you, Rose."

"Oh, well, thank you!" She plants her hands on her hips, looking up at the sign. "That looks swell up there, doesn't it?"

Chief Sousa follows her gaze, the night breeze ruffling his hair. "It looks great. Nice job, Agent Roberts."


	64. Modern day AU with Jack & Daniel in veteran's therapy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted [on Tumblr](https://sholiofic.tumblr.com/post/166632375743/prompt-ac-modern-day-au-jack-and-therapy-with).

The thing was, going to meetings for as long as Daniel had been doing it, you got to the point where you started noticing ... stuff.

It wasn't that he _deliberately_ people-watched at veterans' support meetings. That wouldn't have been right. But Daniel's natural empathy and interest in people made it impossible not to.

And the sense he got off the blond guy who usually sat in a corner and didn't ever speak up was ... not so good.

Daniel had once tried to talk to him at the coffee machine in the corner, and got rebuffed with a snide insult. So, the guy was a jerk. Daniel kinda got an idea of how that worked, though.

And he also felt like, in some ways, it'd been easier on guys like him, the ones who came back from the war broken in some obvious, visible way. The blond guy was exactly the sort of vet who would be total crap at dealing with it, Daniel thought. He was tall, athletic, good looking. Even when he was tucking himself into a chair in the corner and ducking his head every time it looked like the conversation might be in danger of drifting in his direction, he still had a sense of -- something Daniel didn't know the word for, but he knew that he didn't have it, and most of his friend group growing up hadn't had it either (other blue-collar kids, the kind who went into factories or the military or trained at vocational apprenticeships when they got out of high school). But he'd gone to school with people who _did_ have it, and this guy had it: an unconscious way of carrying himself, like he expected the world to bend in front of him.

Must be tough, Daniel thought, to be carrying that around and run headlong into something that wouldn't bend.

He hadn't really meant to notice the guy, and he hadn't meant to get involved. The meeting's regular mediator had talked to him, a few times, about doing some mentoring, but Daniel had tried to dodge it. He didn't feel ready to carry other people's crap when he was barely dealing with his own.

So he wasn't sure, when he looked up and noticed Blond Guy ducking out early, what made him get up and follow.

It'd been a rough night ... a rough month. They'd lost a few members lately. People always drifted in and out, it wasn't unusual if even the die-hard regulars skipped a week, but in the last few weeks they'd had two suicides in the group and a few more of the regular attendees who just stopped coming, nobody knew why.

And tonight's stories were a little more raw-edged than usual, so when Blond Guy walked out, it wasn't like Daniel didn't get that. But he also got a feeling of ... he wasn't sure what. He just thought, if he let the guy walk away, this was probably going to become one of those nagging loose ends that was part of belonging to a group like this. One of those untold stories, one of those people who just stopped coming. Dead, drunk, moved somewhere else -- no one would ever know for sure.

Daniel reached for his crutch and followed.

It was a cold, windy night; the autumn wind tried to snatch the door out of his hands when Daniel emerged from the side entrance to the community center where the meetings were held. He wished he'd worn a warmer coat. Peggy wasn't picking him up for an hour yet.

The blond guy was headed for the parking lot. Daniel took a deep breath. 

He could just let him go. Ought to let him go, maybe. Guy was dealing with a lot of his own demons; they all were. He'd probably snap at Daniel poking into his business, like he had over the coffeepot. And honestly, Daniel wouldn't blame him. It wasn't his problem. Wasn't his mess to clean up.

But he still called out, "Hey!"

The blond guy turned back, frowning. "Yeah, what?"

Daniel crutched over. At least Blond Guy wasn't running away.

"It's just getting a little tense in there. I needed some air. Looked like you did, too."

"Yeah, and?"

Defensiveness, bordering on aggression, like the other time Daniel had tried to talk to him.

"And nothing," Daniel said, with a brief smile. "I was gonna get a cup of coffee at the all-night place up the street. Better coffee than they have in there, and my girlfriend's not getting me 'til later. You want to come?"

The stranger regarded him with a cool, clear gaze, and all of a sudden, Daniel got a feeling that he'd sometimes gotten in the past -- that this was one of those seemingly inconsequential moments when things could tip either way, but it _mattered,_ what happened now.

Back in Afghanistan, he'd felt that feeling all day, the day he'd lost his leg. People he'd tried to explain it to, even Peggy, seemed to think he'd had (or thought he'd had) a premonition of doom. But it wasn't that. It was more just a feeling that his decisions _mattered_ that day. In retrospect, he'd probably made the wrong choice. But hell, he could've stayed back at base, stayed off that patrol, and maybe a buddy would've bit the big one in Daniel's place. He didn't know if the choice he’d made was the right or wrong one, only that it was a choice that had changed everything.

He did know that if he had it to do over again, he still would've gone out on that patrol, even knowing what was going to happen. Because the alternative might have been worse.

And then the other man smiled, just a little.

"Why the hell not," he said. "I'm Jack."


	65. Wild West AU snippet

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Originally posted on Tumblr](https://sholiofic.tumblr.com/post/167865889288/wild-west-au). This one was part of a discussion, so you might want to click through to the tumblr post for AU!Peggy's full backstory and where this all came from.

There was a tumbledown shack about half a mile away, found by one of Dugan's riders on a patrol sweep, that they used for the poker game. Better than frying their brains in the sun.

No telling who had built it, some squatter or prospector or would-be farmer driven off by drought. It was perched on a bluff overlooking a stream that was little more than a brackish trickle of water, and beyond that, a sweep of wild, lonely wasteland, shimmering in the heat, stretching to the distant blue mountains. The shack had probably never stood true, but now it leaned distinctly to the side. Huge gaps between the bleached boards let in sun and dust. 

But there was a plank table to sit at, some old stump-ends to use as chairs. Outside, the faint jingle of harness could be heard as Dugan's men who'd drawn the short straws watered the horses -- theirs and Mr. Thompson's -- and scrounged for shade where the animals could browse a bit. Mr. Thompson's badly bruised bodyguard/driver was in the coach -- Peggy had talked Dugan into giving him some water too.

"Are you going to untie me?" Thompson asked. For a man who was surrounded by outlaws, several of them pointing guns at him, he seemed unruffled, but Peggy didn't think the sweat on his forehead was only from the heat of the day.

"Thinkin' about it." Dugan plunked a deck of cards and a bottle of whiskey on the table between them and stepped back, unslinging his shotgun from his shoulder.

"Oh, do untie him," Peggy said, taking her seat on a stump on one side of the table. "It's more sporting that way."

"And the shotgun pointed at my forehead doesn't tilt the odds in any way?" Thompson inquired, looking up at Happy Sam and pulling away slightly as the big man slit the bonds around his wrists with a very large knife.

"That's to make sure you don't try anything," Dugan said.

"What am I going to try? You've taken my gun."

"Cheating," Junior Juniper put in.

"Backstabbin'."

"Horse thieving."

"Just plain stabbin'."

"Is this a list of things _I_ might do," Thompson demanded, over the babble of suggestions, "or a list of things the bunch of _you_ are wanted for?"

The various guns pointed at him bristled more aggressively.

"Boys," Peggy said mildly. She shuffled the cards and passed them across the table. Thompson hesitated and then cut them.

He was afraid, she thought. Any man in his position would be. But he was hiding it well. She respected that; she'd spent a good deal of her life doing the same. Many people would be surprised how far you could get with a good bluff. But you had to have something to back it up.

She took a swig from the bottle of sun-warmed whiskey and then passed that across the table too. This garnered a curious eyebrow-quirk from Thompson before he took a drink as well.

Peggy tucked a hand under the man's shirt she wore and worked it beneath her rather sweaty girdle (there was a wolf whistle from somewhere in Dugan's gang, quickly squashed as someone else stomped on the whistler's foot) and took out a small bag that jingled. She tossed it onto the table. "There's my stake. Do we need to fetch your bank box from your wagon?"

Thompson gave her a long look, then pushed his hat back and took a small purse of embossed leather from under _his_ shirt, dropping it onto the dusty table. There was a faint clink. He undid the top and flipped a coin into the center of the table. Peggy added her own ante.

"May the best man win," Thompson said, reaching for the bottle.

"Oh, indeed," Peggy said, and dealt the cards.

 

*

 

Daniel would remember until the day he died the moment that the woman walked into his saloon.

It wasn't just that they never got women in here. The _Eagle_ was a clean establishment, which meant they didn't allow fallen women to ply their trade like Chadwick's hotel and saloon up the street, and respectable women wouldn't darken the door of a drinking house. Rooms upstairs were offered to single men only.

When the rough-looking gang strolled in, covered with dust and smelling like a week in the sun on the back of a horse, Daniel smelled trouble (as well as horse). He reached a hand to make sure the shotgun under the bar was where it always was. He knew how to handle himself in a fight, the war hadn’t changed that as it had changed so many other things, but this was a tough-looking bunch and he knew he was on his own. No point in calling Sheriff Krzeminski for this sort of thing; the man was worse than useless. He’d probably just ask the gang for a bribe, shake hands all around, and wander back up the street to Chadwick’s whorehouse.

The woman was no less rough-looking than the rest of them. Her face was smudged with dirt, her sweaty hair tied in a rough tail under a wide-brimmed hat (pushed back now to dangle on her back), and she marched up to the bar with a firm stride. Daniel couldn't help noticing she was wearing men's trousers before jerking his gaze decisively up to her face.

"Ma'am, I think you might be looking for Miss Fry's boarding house," Daniel told her. “It’s just down the street, behind the post office.”

"No, I am where I intend to be." She was British, he discovered in surprise, the accent curling appealingly around her words. You heard a lot of different accents on the frontier -- Norwegian and French, Russian and Chinese, Deep South and Newfoundland fishing town and half a dozen types of Indian -- but what in the name of the devil was a British woman, well-educated from the sound of her, doing all the way out here?

He couldn't help thinking of who that accent reminded him of -- but no, not _here_ \--

And she smiled at him, which he wasn't expecting. She looked as rough and filthy as her companions, but her manners were impeccable. While Daniel was still trying to recover, the British woman took what appeared at first glance to be a stiff card out of her pocket, and placed it on the bar top. 

"I'm told you might be able to help me. I'm looking for this man."

Daniel looked down at a creased and worn tintype. Even in the poor light of the bar, those light, laughing eyes looked back into his own with shocking familiarity.

It was Michael Carter, his former partner in the Pinkertons.


	66. Song Remains the Same AU with Daniel getting shot

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For this prompt on Tumblr: _I was COMPLETELY convinced that in The Song Remains The Same the way you were going to fix Jack and Peggy was to injure Daniel and make them both fret so much they just clicked back into place. A reversal of Jack getting shot in the chest, if you will. I can't say I'm not relieved I was wrong buuuut.... if you ever want to write an AU of your own fic...?_
> 
> [The Song Remains the Same](http://archiveofourown.org/works/9405785/chapters/21292853) is my Peggy-gets-amnesia OT3 AU. This was [originally posted on Tumblr](https://sholiofic.tumblr.com/post/169131023513/i-was-completely-convinced-that-in-the-song).
> 
> This cuts away from the middle of [Chapter 6](http://archiveofourown.org/works/9405785/chapters/21792254), when Peggy and Jack are going through the papers at Howard's mansion, and reuses a bit from that chapter at the start.

"Do you love us?" she asked.

The words came out in a rush, falling into the lull in their conversation. Jack jerked his head up, looking wide-eyed and shocked.

"What?"

"Daniel and me." She'd thought so much about this from her own perspective, trying to understand what _she_ was getting out of their relationship. But she'd never turned it around and tried to understand it from Jack's. As he'd said at the house, his job was on another coast. His life was in New York. And yet he was here. With them.

"I ..." He stared at her, and she wasn't sure if it was pure intuition, or a fragment of emotional memory recovered from that other Peggy who still lurked somewhere in her head, but she had the sudden feeling that this was _important_. That, no matter what he said next, something had to change.

But before he could speak, the ringing of the phone cut across Peggy's tight-stretched nerves, making her jump. It was some small relief that Jack jumped too, and his tightly wound expression dissolved into a quick flash of a grin, which Peggy found her own lips involuntarily echoing before she caught herself.

As the phone rang again, Jack said, "Aren't you going to get that?"

"It's most likely one of Howard's girls." The moment had slipped away, and Peggy reached for the photos spread out between them. The phone jangled again. Jack raised an eyebrow and Peggy sighed. "I am not Howard's answering service."

"Guess that's my job today. After all those times I had you take my calls back in New York, it's the least I can do." 

Apparently oblivious to Peggy staring after him, he headed for the phone sitting on a small, ornate end table. "Stark residence, Howard Stark's answering service speaking," he said, flashing Peggy another sly grin over his shoulder. Then the grin dropped away; his face became a mask. "Yes, this is Chief Thompson, and she's with me. Yes, we'll be there." He hung up the phone and before Peggy could speak, he said sharply, "We gotta go."

"What? Where?" Peggy demanded, chasing him toward the door.

"Hospital," Jack said. He turned to her, and she glimpsed, for just a moment, the depth of fear and pain in his eyes. "Daniel's been shot."

 

***

 

Peggy was not expecting deja vu to hit her like a sock to the jaw as she stepped through the hospital doors. It wasn't from her own hospitalization earlier, that much she knew. No, this was _familiar_ , all of it: the smell of the corridors, the hardness of the waiting-room chairs, the terrible coffee; the low voices of the agents briefing them on Daniel's shooting (in broad daylight, just outside the back door of the Auerbach Agency); even the tension in Jack's shoulders tugged at her with a sense of familiarity. She'd been here before. Done this before.

"Brings back memories, I bet," Jack murmured as they waited for a nurse to update them on Daniel's condition. Then he gave his head a sharp shake. "No. Guess it wouldn't for you."

"Of the war?" she asked, but somewhere deep down in her chest was the certainty that he did not mean the war. This had happened more recently; it was somewhere in those memories she couldn't touch, but still touched _her_ from time to time.

"Of me getting shot," Jack said tersely, and then, before Peggy could ask any more questions, the nurse arrived. Peggy was deeply startled to see a look of profound dislike cross the woman's face at the sight of her.

"He's still in surgery and likely to remain so for the next few hours," the nurse said tightly, addressing her words to Jack rather than to Peggy. "I'm afraid I don't know much more than that."

As the nurse left, Peggy asked Jack quietly, "Have I done something to offend her?"

The corner of his mouth quirked and tightened. "You stole her fiancé, Marge."

"You?" she asked, startled into indiscretion.

"No. Daniel."

Daniel ... had been engaged? Peggy's mind spun in circles as she and Jack went to sit down again. Her initial shock made her ashamed; why _wouldn't_ a woman find Daniel worth marrying? He was kind, intelligent, and handsome. It was only ... there was _so much_ she didn't know about him. About both of them.

She hadn't really put together the way the hospital made her feel with what Daniel had told her last night about Jack being shot, how it had somehow pushed all of them into ... this. It was so different hearing about it -- dry words, in Daniel's soft voice -- than being here, confronted with the way the memories hovered at the corner of her mind, tantalizingly close, pushing and pulling at her emotions as familiar sounds and smells waited like traps.

She felt cold down to her core. She needed to be up and doing something; she was never made to wait. Daniel's shooter, or shooters, were still out there -- connected to her memory loss, no doubt.

When she sprang to her feet, Jack looked up sharply; he'd been sitting with his head bowed, hands clasped between his knees. "Where are you going?"

"To the Auerbach Agency. You heard the nurse. There's no need for us to sit here; there won't be news for hours yet. And the early hours of an investigation are the most critical."

Jack opened his mouth, then closed it, nodded, and got up. "I'll drive. Just give me a minute. Gotta do something first. Meet me at the car."

With that he turned on his heel and went abruptly down the corridor that led to the restrooms.

Peggy hesitated and then followed him.

She wasn't sure what made her do it, but she'd always trusted her gut. She stopped outside the door of the men's room, not quite concerned enough to follow him inside, and was still there when Jack came out, his eyes reddened and his hair smoothed perfectly back into place. He stopped dead at the sight of her, took a breath, and said, his voice rough, "I thought I told you to wait at the car."

"I thought," Peggy said, as if she hadn't just had the breath knocked out of _her,_ "that you ought to know by now, following orders is not always my strongest point."

Jack gave a sudden, wet-sounding laugh, and the smile he gave her was unexpectedly, disarmingly soft. "No, you're right, I can't really argue with that," he said, slipping on a pair of sunglasses; with the traces of tears hidden, he looked once again like the man she remembered from two years ago, guarded behind the familiar glossy facade.

They walked together to the car, and Jack took the driver's seat. As he turned out of the car park, Peggy looked down at her own hands in her lap. Slowly she reached over and placed one of them atop Jack's hand where it rested on the gearshift.

He jerked, started to glance at her, and then looked forward, his expression hard to discern with the sunglasses in place. His fingers twitched and his hand moved, turned over, and Peggy's fingers laced through his, as if their two hands were pieces of a puzzle clicking into place.

She held his hand all the way to the Auerbach Agency.


	67. Steve is defrosted in the 1970s

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Originally posted on Tumblr.](https://sholiofic.tumblr.com/post/165074989963/agent-carter-ot3-steve-rogers-gets-defrosted-in) I still want to write the long fic that this is part of.

"We found him," Howard's voice said on the phone. "We _found_ him, Peg."

... and in that initial instant, with her mind full of the day-to-day business of SHIELD, she had no idea what he was even talking about. Her mouth was open to ask when it all crashed on her, the elation in his voice, the way he sounded so much like he used to sound, decades ago.

"Peg?" he was asking now. "Peggy, did you hear me?"

"I heard you," she said. She hadn't even known he was still looking. Of course Steve deserved it, of _course_ , but ... she hadn't known he was looking. This was a relief. It would be good for Steve's family, if any remained, to have closure. And for Howard, perhaps more than anyone. "In the Arctic?"

"Yeah, pretty close to our original search grid. If we'd just -- but it doesn't matter, doesn't matter." Howard cleared his throat. "Peg, I need a SHIELD plane up here, _yesterday_ \-- with the best medical staff and portable facilities that you've got."

There were about a million things to untangle in that sentence, not the least being Howard's on-again, off-again relationship with SHIELD, but Peggy zeroed in on the most important word: _medical._ "Howard," she said slowly, "he's not _alive_ , is he?"

"We don't know. Steve and the plane are encased in ice." Peggy was glad he wasn't here, glad he couldn't see the way she still reacted at the sound of Steve's name. "We still don't know what the serum is capable of. I admit it's unlikely, but from our preliminary survey, it looks like he's, uh -- he's still in perfect shape. It's possible."

"I'll scramble a team immediately," Peggy told him. Her brain was running on autopilot as they went back and forth on the details -- _just another mission, just another field op_ \-- until she hung up. And then there were calls to make, preparations to set into motion.

After she'd gotten the ball rolling on the -- she didn’t know whether to call it a recovery or a rescue, on the _retrieval_ ... only then, she allowed herself the brief luxury of burying her face in her hands for a moment, elbows resting on her desk.

Steve wasn't alive. It wasn't possible. No need to think about it -- no need to think of Steve being twenty-seven, when she was _fifty-seven_ ...

No need to think of a love she'd long since left behind her, a lost future she hadn't thought about in decades.

_If you're alive, why couldn't we have found you thirty years ago, before I built a life ...?_

"Peggy?"

Peggy looked up with a smile, an automatic response to that beloved voice. "I didn't know you were still in the office."

"Got tied up with paperwork," Daniel said, flashing her a quick grin that was no less dazzling for the laugh lines that time had slashed deep in his face. He'd embraced the relaxed fashions of the 1970s, and his hair was a mess of salt-and-pepper curls that he'd long since given up on slicking down, his brown tweed jacket unbuttoned to reveal the yellow open-necked shirt beneath.

( _"You look like a used-car salesman,"_ Jack liked to tell him, still polished in a suit and tie, because Jack was always going to be Jack.)

"And it's a good thing I did," Daniel added, limping into the room. With the latest generation StarkTech prosthetic leg, he rarely even used a cane, but he was leaning on one today, which meant he was tired. "Jack called from Berlin. He's tied up, probably won't be home for another week or so. Which means he'll miss Debbie's graduation."

"Oh, poor thing. We'll have to break it to her gently." Although Debbie was Daniel's biological daughter, and Carol with her riot of blonde curls was Jack's, the girls had gravitated towards precisely the opposite father figures in their teenage years. Both of them loved both of the men who semi-openly shared their mother's life, but Debbie -- with her penchant for power suits, a nearly-finished law degree from Yale, and a burning desire for a political career -- was very definitively Jack's favorite daughter, while gentle, idealistic Carol, who was currently working with a nonprofit helping Vietnam veterans and had frequently clashed with her mother over what she saw as SHIELD's nongovernmental overreaches, was just as obviously Daniel's.

"She'll understand," Daniel said wryly, resting his good hip against the edge of Peggy's desk. "She might be a little hurt, but she's a practical kid, and I think she gets Jack better than either of us do. For some reason."

"No accounting for taste," Peggy said, the playful banter emerging, after all these years, with little input from her otherwise-occupied brain.

But Daniel knew her too well. He leaned forward and reached out to brush her cheek with his fingertips. "You okay?"

"Yes ... no ... I don't know." She reached up to run her hand through her hair again, and instead brushed an errant curl into place. "I got a call from Howard just now."

Daniel's mouth twisted. "Well, that's always fun. What'd he want?"

By now, Howard had burned many of his bridges at SHIELD. Not all of them; never all of them. He still got along well with most of the science division. But rifts were even developing with Hank Pym, these days. And those who'd never gotten along well with Howard (such as Daniel, or Jack) had ever less patience with him.

"He wanted to tell me ..." She hesitated. A part of her wanted to wait to break the news until they knew for sure, one way or another. But, while she and Daniel both understood that there were things she couldn't tell him (and vice versa) because of their jobs, this was too big to keep from him. Not intentionally. "He thinks they might have found Steve. I'm sending a team up. I ... haven't decided if I'm going to be on it."

"Oh," Daniel said softly. He reached over to brush against the fingers that were still trying to adjust her graying curls, and hooked his hand lightly around hers. "That must be pretty strange, after all these years. But it'd be good to ... you know. Have something for the family to bury, and all of that."

"Yes, that was my first thought," she admitted, and knew as soon as the words had left her mouth that she wasn't going to tell him about the other part: that Steve might have survived the ice. Not until they knew. Not unless he asked.

Not yet.


	68. New Year's 1963/64

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Originally posted on Tumblr.](https://sholiofic.tumblr.com/post/169176312188/happy-new-year-i-thought-this-new-year-could)

The television (abominable thing; Peggy still wasn't used to it) was tuned to Guy Lombardo's New Year's Eve show. Big-band music and the sound of Michael playing with his new Christmas-gift cap gun came to her through the open bathroom door as she helped little Suzie with her bath, and then put the bathed and bath-powdered four-year-old to bed with a kiss, tucking Suzie's brand-new ragdoll next to her pillow.

"I want Papa," the child complained fretfully, reaching for the doll.

"Papa will be home when you wake up," Peggy promised, hoping it was true. Daniel had been delayed in London, delayed and delayed again, first by politics, then by weather. A trans-Atlantic flight was much faster now than it had been the first time she'd done it, just as trans-Atlantic calls were commonplace now rather than a rarity, but it was still anyone's guess where Daniel was: in the air? Diverted to another airport? 

But it was her job as Suzie's mother to be certain, so she kissed the little girl's forehead and turned the light out, leaving the door slightly cracked. "Bedtime, Michael," she called down the stairs.

"Five more minutes, Mum?"

"It's nine o'clock, love."

"I want to stay up until Papa comes home," Michael complained, hanging on the banister as Peggy came down the stairs.

"We don't know when he'll be home, sweetheart."

"But it's Christmas vacation?" the child asked hopefully. Sometimes, Peggy thought, he was the spitting image of the uncle he'd never met, the one he was named for; she remembered Michael looking at their mother with just that expression, eyes wide and hopeful.

"Tell you what," she said, kneeling to straighten his collar and brush back his brown hair. "As long as you're in bed, you can read some of your new books, all right? Just make sure I don't hear any rustling around up there, and you can read as late as you like."

This got the desired results, and soon he was tucked in as well, a pile of comic books and brand-new gift books beside him, and a flashlight in his hand. Peggy left him to it and went downstairs, where the television was still playing its live broadcast from New York. She had the urge to turn it off and stop the senseless babbling, but Daniel always liked to leave it on (he enjoyed the music, and liked seeing the city all lit up), so she left the television on for company while she made herself a cup of tea.

Some years, it was hard to feel excited about the year rolling over to the next date on the calendar. This was one of those years. The entire country was still reeling from the President's murder a little over a month ago -- Peggy thought it hadn't hit her as hard as a native American, most likely, but it was still a shocking thing, shaking the very ground under her feet. And this was coming on the heels of so much else: unrest in this country, unrest in the world, missiles in Cuba just off the U.S. border, the Soviets in space where they could attack anyone at any time, and credible rumors that there would be war in Vietnam by the end of the next year.

There were those who thought the country wouldn't even make it to another new year.

_But we made it through worse, didn't we, love?_ Peggy thought, rolling her fingertips around the ring on her third left finger. It was easy, sometimes, to feel if the world was rolling into darkness, but then she thought of how she'd spent the New Year of 1942/43, crouched in freezing mud with bombs bursting overhead, the war looking like it would never end, as if the Nazi war machine must inevitably crush everything in its path. Or how about those last hours of 1944, with Steve mourning Bucky and the entire world frozen, and Daniel, though she didn't know it, writhing in fever just a few hundred miles from where she'd been sipping lukewarm tea in Phillips' command tent. Or even the next year, when the world was celebrating and it was her own world that seemed frozen, the future stretching ahead of her like an endless bare road she must plod until its conclusion ...

They'd seen darker days than these. And there must inevitably be dark days ahead, there always would be, but there would also be Christmases with new dolls and cap guns and children chattering happily to their father even though he was at the other end of a long-distance line half a world away; there would be snow falling outside the window, and big-band music on the annoying chatterbox of a telly, a hot cup of tea in her hands and the promise that the arms of the person she loved most in the world would eventually be around her once more.

And dawn would come again, as it always did. You just had to be patient and wait for it.

The band on the television struck up a new song, and Peggy carried her tea into the living room and curled up on the sofa to wait, and to watch the new year ring in.


End file.
